This post is an excerpt of an article published in the World Archaeology Journal about the importance of walrus ivory to the medieval Norse of Greenland and Iceland.
I encourage interested readers to click the links provided to read the entire fascinating article from the source. (Ed.)
***
Published
online: 20 Apr 2015
In
this article
Abstract
Walrus-tusk
ivory and walrus-hide rope were highly desired goods in Viking Age north-west
Europe. New finds of walrus bone and ivory in early Viking Age contexts in
Iceland are concentrated in the south-west, and suggest extensive exploitation
of nearby walrus for meat, hide and ivory during the first century of
settlement. In Greenland, archaeofauna suggest a very different specialized
long-distance hunting of the much larger walrus populations in the Disko Bay
area that brought mainly ivory to the settlement areas and eventually to
European markets. New lead isotopic analysis of archaeological walrus ivory and
bone from Greenland and Iceland offers a tool for identifying possible source
regions of walrus ivory during the early Middle Ages. This opens possibilities
for assessing the development and relative importance of hunting grounds from
the point of view of exported products.
Introduction:
was it for walrus?
The
Norse expansion into the North Atlantic is remarkable testimony to the maritime
transformation of the early medieval world. Sailing technology and skills
developed in the ninth and tenth centuries ce in Scandinavia allowed
the settlement of diaspora communities in Iceland and Greenland, with further
foraging into the North American continent which had impacts upon both human
communities and island ecosystems that persist to the present day (Vésteinsson,
McGovern and Keller
2002Vésteinsson, O., T.
H. McGovern, and C. Keller. 2002. “Enduring Impacts: Social
and Environmental Aspects of Viking Age Settlement in Iceland and Greenland.” Archaeologica
Islandica 2: 98–136.). This diaspora is a legacy of the ‘florescence
of piracy, trade, migration, conquest and exploration across much of Europe’
which defines the Viking Age (Barrett et al.
2010Barrett, J., R. Beukens, I. Simpson, P. Ashmore, S. Poaps,
and J. Huntley. 2010. “What Was the Viking Age and When did it
Happen? A View from Orkney.” Norwegian Archaeological Review 33 (1): 33–44.,
289). The rising impact of long-range seafaring by the Norse settlers, traders
and raiders can be seen as part of a global pattern of the late first
millennium ce. Aspects of the maritime expansion that is associated with
the Viking Age in the northern seas of Europe are paralleled by developments in
other maritime regions of the world in the same period, e.g. in eastern Africa
(Sinclair
2007Sinclair, P. 2007.
“What Is the Archaeological Evidence for External Trading Contacts on the East
African Coast in the First Millennium AD?” In Natural Resources and
Cultural Connections of the Red Sea, edited by J. Starkey, P. Starkey,
and T. Wilkinson (British Archaeological Reports international
series 1661), Oxford: Archaeopress.; Sinclair, Ekblom and Wood
2012Sinclair, P.
J. J., A. Ekblom, and M. Wood. 2012. “Trade and
Society on the South-East Africa Coast in the Later First Millennium AD; the
Case of Chibuene.” Antiquity 86: 723–37.
[CrossRef],
[Web of Science ®]) and in insular Southeast Asia (Heng
2009Heng, D. 2009. Sino-Malay
Trade and Diplomacy from the Tenth through the Fourteenth Century. Athens: Ohio
University Research in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series No. 121 Ohio
University Press.; Krahl et al.
2010Krahl, R., J. Guy, J.
K. Wilson, and J. Raby 2010. Shipwrecked: Tang
Treasures and Monsoon Winds. Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler
Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Singapore: National Heritage Board, Singapore
Tourism Board.; Miksic
2013Miksic, J.
N. 2013. Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea. Singapore: National
University of Singapore.). Seafaring catalysed the creation of new areas of
settlement and diaspora communities, and created sustained networks of
interaction that introduced new regions and products into existing exchange
cycles. As a consequence, the world of the early Middle Ages came to be
integrated by flows of material culture that reached almost a global scale, as
illustrated for example by the spread of ninth-century Abbasid (Islamic) coins
from eastern China (Guy
2010Guy, J. 2010.
“Rare and Strange Goods: International Trade in Ninth-Century Asia.” In Shipwrecked:
Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds, edited by R. Krahl, 19–29. Washington,
DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.) to Iceland
(Blackburn
2005Blackburn, M. 2005.
“Coinage and Contacts in the North Atlantic during the Seventh to Mid-Tenth
Centuries.” In Viking and Norse in the North Atlantic: Selected Papers
from the Proceedings of the Fourteenth Viking Congress, Tórshavn, July 19–30,
2001, edited by A. Mortensen and S. V. Arge, 141–51. Tórshavn: Foroya
Fródskaparfelag(The Faroese Academy of Sciences) in collaboration with Foroya
Fornminnissavn (Historical Museum of the Faroe Islands).).
The
Norse involvement in such networks is evident in the continued relations
between the much dispersed North Atlantic settlers and their parent societies
after the ninth century ad. Urban centres in Scandinavia and in the
British Isles were indispensable to the life-style of the Iceland and Greenland
settlers as suppliers of culturally important manufactured products and
commodities, including iron. In return, the settlers had access to a range of
Arctic products that were prized further south: hides, furs, eider down and,
perhaps most notably, tusk ivory from walrus (Odobenus rosmarus L.). From the
beginning of settlement in Iceland and Greenland, exploitation of natural
resources from the Arctic hinterland included walrus hunting (Arneborg
1998Arneborg, J. 1998.
“The High Arctic ‘Utmark’ of the Norse Greenlanders.” In Outland Use in
Preindustrial Europe, edited by H. Andersson, L. Ersgard,
and E. Svensson, 156–126. Lund: Institute of
Archaeology, Lund University.; Lucas
2008Lucas, G. 2008.
“Pálstóftir: A Viking Age Shieling in Iceland.” Norwegian Archaeological
Review 41 (1): 85–100. doi:10.1080/00293650802069193.
[Taylor
& Francis Online],
[Web of Science ®]). Several authors (Vésteinsson et al.
2006Orri, V., H. Þórláksson,
and A. Einarsson, eds. 2006. Reykjavik 871+/-2: The
Settlement Exhibition. Reykjavík: Reykjavik City Museum.; Keller
2010Keller, C. 2010.
“Furs, Fish, and Ivory: Medieval Norsemen at the Arctic Fringe.” Journal
of the North Atlantic 3: 1–23. doi:10.3721/037.003.0105.
[CrossRef]; Einarsson Bjarni
2011Einarsson
Bjarni, F. 2011. “Róum við í selinn, rostungs út á melinn. Um
rostunga við Íslandsstrendur.” In Fjöruskeljar. Afmælisrit til heiðurs
Jónínu Hafsteinsdóttur sjötugri 29. Mars 2011, edited by G. Kvaran, H.
J.Ámundason, and S. Sigmundsson, 31–52. Reykjavík: Mal
og Menning.) have suggested that the first exploration and settlement of both
Iceland (c. 850–75 ce) and Greenland (c. 980–90 ce) had an initial
stimulus from exploiting the walrus, then native to both islands. This is
supported by the observation that the use of walrus ivory can be traced
archaeologically in finds from Scandinavia, the British Isles and continental
Europe, particularly in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, corresponding to
the heyday of Norse settlement in Greenland (Roesdahl
2003Roesdahl, E. 2003.
“Walrus Ivory and Other Northern Luxuries: Their Importance for Norse Voyages
and Settlements in Greenland and America.” In Vínland Revisited: The Norse
World at the Turn of the First Millenium. Selected Papers from the Viking
Millennium International Symposium, edited by S. Lewis-Simpson, 15–24 September 2000, 145–52. Newfoundland: Newfoundland
and Labrador. St. Johns.). Walrus ivory is recorded as workshop debris in major
trading towns such as Dublin, Trondheim, Bergen, Sigtuna, Lund and Schleswig,
and in art objects and ornaments (Roesdahl
2005Roesdahl, E. 2005.
“Walrus Ivory – Demand, Supply, Workshops, and Greenland.” In Viking and
Norse in the North Atlantic. Select Papers from the Proceedings of the
Fourteenth Viking Congress, Tórshavn, July 19–30, 2001, edited
by A. Mortensen and S. V. Arge, 182–91.), the
most famous in the British Isles being the Lewis chessmen, a group of
ninety-three twelfth-century chess pieces discovered in 1831 on the Isle of
Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland (Robinson
2004Robinson, J. 2004. The
Lewis Chessmen. London: British Museum Press.).
 |
| Figure 1 provides a location map for place names mentioned in this article. |
The
extent to which long-distance flows of moveable wealth (such as walrus ivory)
had a sufficient scale and intensity in the early Middle Ages to be a potential
causal dynamic for major social change (such as the Norse North Atlantic
settlement) remains a subject of debate. Critics have downplayed the impact of
Viking Age and early medieval long-distance trade and exchange (Wickham
2005Wickham, C. 2005. Framing
the Early Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[CrossRef], 818ff.; Hodges
2012Hodges, R. 2012. Dark
Age Economics: A New Audit. London: Bristol Classical Press., 121).
In compliance with this view, a traditional assessment (endorsed by medieval
saga writers) ascribes the incentive for settlement in Iceland and, by
extension, Greenland, to a quest for landnám – the search for
suitable farmland for a growing population. The issue of Norse trade in walrus
ivory brings these matters to a head. On the one hand, the marginal farming
potential offered by subarctic Iceland and low arctic Greenland stretches the
‘farming hypothesis’ to its limit. On the other hand, the ‘trade hypothesis’
involves the no less remarkable assumption that societies at the far ecological
and cultural margin of Europe were essentially conditioned by exchange cycles
involving sea journeys of more than 3,000km – equivalent to the distance from
Barcelona to Moscow. Christian Keller recently summed up the puzzle as to why
the Norse colonized Greenland and pushed into high arctic Norway in the late
tenth century ce: ‘Was it a desperate search for farmland at the margins
of the known world, or was it a market-driven economic strategy applied to
sub-arctic territory?’ (Keller
2010Keller, C. 2010.
“Furs, Fish, and Ivory: Medieval Norsemen at the Arctic Fringe.” Journal
of the North Atlantic 3: 1–23. doi:10.3721/037.003.0105.
[CrossRef], 1).
This
article presents new evidence and offers a framing interpretation, which
outlines a route map for resolving this question. New finds of walrus bone and
ivory in early Viking Age contexts in Iceland suggest exploitation of nearby
walrus for meat, hide and ivory that appears to have driven local Icelandic
walrus populations to extinction. New Greenlandic archaeofauna from both the
Eastern and Western Settlements continue to suggest a very different
specialized long-distance hunt of the much larger walrus populations in the
Disko Bay area that mainly brought ivory and hide rather than meat to the
settlement areas and eventually to European markets. New lead isotopic analysis
of archaeological walrus ivory and bone from Greenland and Iceland shows
distinct and consistent variation in the lead isotope signatures in samples
with a different geographical origin, and so offers a tool for identifying
different regional sources of walrus ivory during the early Middle Ages. This
opens possibilities for assessing the development and relative importance of
different hunting grounds from the point of view of exported products. This
article thus presents an overview of existing archaeological evidence for Norse
North Atlantic walrus hunting and the initial results of lead isotope analyses
aimed at sourcing walrus ivory to geographically specific past walrus
populations. Collaborative interdisciplinary work is ongoing, so this
presentation is necessarily a report of work in progress rather than a final
statement.
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