What I meant to say was that this entire thread (your interview along with commentary) does a far better job at explaining the fate of the Greenland Norse than I every could. I didn’t mean to dispute your central thesis about food taboo, I think it has a lot of merit.

I’m new to this site but I’ll be checking in on a regular basis from now on!

Mads

I think I’m a tad confused as to the nature of the Greenlanders - they were Christian Vikings?

Yes. Olav II Haraldsson or “Saint Olaf” is generally cited as most responsible for the Christianization of Norway. This is not true, as Norway had been deeply Christian for some time, and all Norwegian kings back to Håkon the Good (c. 920 – 961) had been Christians.

Iceland, the home of Erik the Red, voted to become Christian at the Althing of 1000 CE. This event is recorded in Njal’s Saga. Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland for some killings in 982 CE. Erik himself was not Christian, but his son Leif–the one who discovered Vinland–built the first Christian church in the Americas. Rumors circulate that Erik converted on his deathbed (in 1003), but regardless, we know that Greenland not only converted to Christianity shortly after Iceland’s conversion, and became deeply Christian in short order. Diamond discusses the ramifications of how lavishly the Greenlanders spent on their cathedrals and clergy, far more per capita than nearly anywhere in Europe. This makes some sense for such a remote outpost; Christianity became one of their lifelines to Europe, one of the most crucial things by which they might define themselves.

My first reaction was to question why there would be no evidence of this food taboo, especially if it was so prevalent, but then again, one would be hard pressed to find any mention of dandelion taboos in our culture.

Exactly. It’s also important to remember that we don’t have all that much written material from Greenland. It was always the furthest frontier of medieval Europe. The most we usual have is ship manifests. This was an odd local abberation of Norse culture, and one that died out, so that makes it pretty difficult to find direct, positive evidence of what they thought about much of anything.

In any case, more than the specific case of the Greenlanders, my objection to your whole “cultural food construct” presentation is that you seem to be implying (at least that’s my impression) our American situation of maladapted cultural food taboos is common across the board in civilization…

I didn’t have much time on the radio, so you should take a look at my more recent article, “Why People Starve,” where I consider this in more detail.

My conviction is this: we all have a cultural construction of food. We don’t just eat anything. Now, typically, finding food is a very easy affair. Foragers put in a grand total of about two hours a day, even in a desert, to find all their food. Horticulturalists are willing to work a little harder to have food they prefer, coming out to an average of about six hours a day. So, how do you get people to work 10-12 hours a day, for less food (and less healthy food) than they’d get if they only worked 2? You can’t control all the edible matter in the world, there’s too much of it. You need to define food–culturally–to be a very narrow range of possibilities. Specifically, a range of possibilities that can be controlled. You can only do that if you convince everyone that if it isn’t farmed, it isn’t food.

This is precisely what we have done. It’s what Daniel Quinn called “locking up the food.” Physically locking up everything that can be eaten would be impossible–but locking up our view of the possibilities, culturally, is very possible.

You and I might agree that this is a silly thing to die for, but historically, that’s exactly what we’ve always done. Every famine goes on amidst incredible abundance of things to eat–just no food. Perhaps the most extreme example is a famine in Germany in the 1800s, during which they had no bread–just a bumper crop of wheat for white bread that they were exporting to Britain and France. But no rye.

Well said. Sorry, I should have been a little more sensitive with my timing. And your research has been much more extensive than mine; Admittedly, my research amounted to about a day’s worth of Googling, snuck in around posting expenses and other mundane job duties. I think I’m a tad confused as to the nature of the Greenlanders - they were Christian Vikings? (I don’t know much about Scandinavian history). My first reaction was to question why there would be no evidence of this food taboo, especially if it was so prevalent, but then again, one would be hard pressed to find any mention of dandelion taboos in our culture. In any case, more than the specific case of the Greenlanders, my objection to your whole “cultural food construct” presentation is that you seem to be implying (at least that’s my impression) our American situation of maladapted cultural food taboos is common across the board in civilization, citing extreme historical examples to back you up, whereas I think the American case is extreme in itself, and that while cultural taboos against food might exist across the board, they are generally not as life-threatening as ours. Yet.

Roxy

PS - You’re correct with the Japanese rice reference; Actually, white rice was considered the food of the elites until recently (it was called silver rice). Everyone else ate brown rice or barley, which was the poor man’s (although much more nutritious)
food. This might be why white rice is now so prevalent in Japanese food - it’s a carryover symbol of status.

Its good to have such a rich source of information!

Kudos, both

Janene

The Norse have always eaten fish, so why wouldn’t the Greenland Vikings? Couldn’t it simply be a matter of the fish not being preserved very well, or otherwise hidden from us? Diamond runs through a number of the theories proposed on this account, most of which are patently ridiculous, and comes to a very good point with this:

The trouble with all those excuses for the lack of fish bones at Greenland Norse sites is that they would apply equally well to Greenland Inuit and Icelandic and Norwegian Norse sites, where fish bones prove instead to be abundant.

Yes, fish bones decompose faster, so we need to look at contemporary Norse sites for comparison, to see how much of their fish bones survived. Short answer: a lot. Even more at the Inuit sites, because Greenland isn’t just a fisherman’s paradise–it’s also an archaeologist’s dream. The soil composition and the cold means that nearly everything in Greenland is incredibly well preserved. We have preserved sheep lice and fecal pellets from the Norse colonies–both of which decay far more quickly than fish bones. As Diamond put it:

Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland refuses initially to believe the incredible claim that the Greenland Norse didn’t eat fish, and starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding … I prefer instead to take the facts at face value; even though Greenland’s Norse originated from a fish-eating society, they may have developed a taboo against eating fish.

But, then, what of the fact that Norse skeletons from the latter years of the colony show that they were eating 80% seafood? This is quite true, and in fact, is part of Diamond’s own argument. This fact has been misrepresented above as if to indicate that it means a shift to 80% fish. Not so. What we find concurring with this is an increasing amount of seal bones in Norse middens. Rather than fish, we can see that the Norse began to eat primarily seals.

The idea that they would not eat “a poor man’s food” doesn’t make much sense. In effect, you’re describing a staple. Bread is such a staple for us today. Every meal includes bread, but if bread is all you have, then you are very poor, i.e., “bread and water.” Roxy, I’m sure you can confirm the same attitudes in Japan regarding rice. At the same time, even Bill Gates would be perfectly willing to eat bread to avoid starvation.

Fish was a Norse staple. It was something that was involved in nearly every meal to one degree or another, but if it was all you had to eat, then you were quite poor. Yet staples, all by themselves, are also good “starvation foods,” even among the rich. So, why no fish bones among the Greenland Norse?

Diamond proposes a theory that I find interesting, and even plausible (particularly given the small population of the Greenland colony, and the “Heroic” nature of Norse society in general). After mentioning that most food taboos concern meat and fish because of the risk of food poisoning, and describing a particularly bad bout he suffered with bad shrimp (worse than his cases of malaria, even), Diamond puts this forward:

This suggests to me a scenario for the Greenland Norse: perhaps Erik the Red, in the first years of the Greenland settlement, got an equally awful case of food poisoning from eating fish. On his recovery, he would have told everybody who would listen to him how bad fish is for you, and ow we Greenlanders are a clean, proud people who would never stoop to the unhealthy habits of those desparate grubby icthyophagous Icelanders and Norwegians.

The “Erik the Red’s Tummy-ache” hypothesis doesn’t need such active proselyzation, though. Food aversion stays with you for a long time–as it should be, it helps avoid dying from posioning. Erik’s food aversion would have meant that fish never again played a significant role in the cycle of “Heroic” redistribution that was such a key element of Norse society. The next generation would have been brought up in a fish-less society; fish would simply be absent from the trained set of “what we do.” There is no active taboo necessarily against it; it’s simply not in the conception of food, just as contemporary Americans have no active taboo necessarily against eating dandelions, but it’s just not in our conception of “food.”

But you are also correct that the wane of shipping to Greenland really put the screws to the colony–something that Diamond discusses at length. However, while this impacted every area of their economy adversely, the conclusion drawn here–that this ended their fishing for lack of boats–is certainly not the case. Firstly, we have no evidence of fishing before that time, as we do in Iceland and Norway. Secondly, we find no fishing hooks, no fish line sinkers, no net sinkers, none of the artifacts of fishing that we find so abundantly in contemporaneous Icelandic and Norwegian sites, at any time in the Greenland colony’s strata–not even in their hale and hardy younger years when, supposedly, they were doing a good deal of fishing–even though Greenland is much better for preserving such artifacts than either Iceland or Norway. Finally, this is Greenland we’re talking about. Yes, it’s easier to fish from a boat, but the Norse knew how to fish from shore, too. In Greenland, that alone could easily have provided for such a small settlement.

I like the “Erik the Red’s Tummy-ache” hypothesis for Greenland’s lack of fish through its early years, but it could also have become an active food taboo with the appearance of the Inuit. At that point, it would become an important matter of distinction. Defining oneself as “European” becomes more important when faced with an other who is “not-European.” If the Greenlanders already didn’t eat fish, then that would only have become more important–not less–with a neighboring society of “savages” who relied entirely on fish. I believe in its earlier years, the Greenland Norse may have looked at fish the way we look at dandelions; by the end, they may have looked at fish the way we look at monkey brains. Once it has become an active food taboo, it elicits a strong disgust reaction. Any attempt to eat the food may result in a physical gag reflex. It may become actually impossible to eat the food.

In short, everything Roxy’s presented is true, but there’s more to the story than just that. When we put it all together, we see that it really is about food taboos. The Arneborg study does show that the Greenland Norse were incredibly adaptive, learning to change their diet to match changing circumstances; probably a good deal more adaptive than we will prove. It does not prove that more fish was consumed, though–it proves that more seal was consumed. Based on this misinterpretation of some of the evidence, Yglesias states, “That’s about 20 minutes of Google work, and certainly not a conclusive review of the literature.”

That should always be a good tip-off. If you think you’ve solved one of the great mysteries of modern archaeology in 20 minutes on Google, then chances are very high you haven’t even scratched the surface of its complexities yet.

The Arneborg study states:

For example, the absence of fishbone in the middens does not prove that the Norse did not eat fish. Not only will fishbone rapidly decay in a midden, more likely they never got there in the first place—fishbone is a food source highly appreciated by, e.g., birds, dogs and pigs. In fact, the isotopes have revealed that dogs are often more marine than their masters.

Sounds plausible, theoretically, but why does this theory only find itself reflected in reality in Greenland, and never in Norway or Iceland? This might explain the absence of fishbones in Greenland, but it opens up an even bigger mystery: why, then, do we find so many fish bones in Icelandic and Norwegian middens? Even more astounding, why do we find so many fish bones at Inuit sites in Greenland? And don’t forget, the Inuit had domesticated dogs, too!

So, there you have it. This is quite the raging archaeological debate, but I must admit that I believe Diamond has, by far, the stronger argument here. The case for a fish-eating Greenland Norse society is, I think, extraordinarily weak, and based primarily on misunderstanding a subset of the evidence available. But it is very much an open debate still, that I will readily admit.

(Sorry if this is a tad too combative, Roxy; good on you for raising the other side. But being accused of spreading disinformation on the air, especially with Mads’ comment of “consider[ing] this matter settled” really rattled my cage!)

[i]Atari![/i]

Mads

Janene

The best article I could find on this was a publication from The Europhysics News:

C-14 Dating and the Disappearance of Norseman from Greenland
http://www.europhysicsnews.com/full/15/article1/article1.html