The Norse Greenland Collapse

The Norse settlement of Greenland, founded by Erik the Red around 985 CE, sustained between four and five thousand people for nearly five centuries before disappearing entirely around 1450. The colony maintained European pastoral farming, built stone cathedrals, tithed to the Pope, and imported iron and stained glass from Norway. It also, across five centuries of worsening climate, refused to adopt the hunting and fishing techniques of the Inuit who were thriving in the same landscape. The last Norse Greenlanders died in sealed rooms with their cattle bones, surrounded by some of the richest fishing grounds in the North Atlantic. The case is Diamond's most haunting illustration that civilizational failure is more often a failure of identity than a failure of knowledge.