Did the Norse or the Aztecs respond better to climate?

The short answer

• Different environments demanded different answers. Grass and rich seas in the North Atlantic lay in scattered pockets separated by dangerous water. Ships, hunting and trade connected those resources. In the Basin of Mexico, a fertile lake system lay concentrated in a closed valley, where organized labor and waterworks could support cultivation. Each environment offered possibilities as well as difficulties, and the societies built different responses around them.
• Scale shaped resilience. A few thousand people at most lived in Norse Greenland, compared with perhaps 1–1.5 million in the Basin of Mexico. The contrast mattered for labor, food storage and the losses a community could absorb. Mexica rulers could draw workers for dikes and raised fields and supplies from a wide area. A lost ship or poor hay harvest placed a burden on Greenland's much smaller population. Institutions and connections also shaped what each society could do with its people.
• Single points of failure decided both endings. Walrus ivory was central to Greenland's exports, and ships from Bergen connected the colony to Europe. As trade declined, alternatives were limited. Tenochtitlan's dependence was concentrated differently: its aqueduct, causeways and canoe routes crossed one lake, where attackers could cut or contest them. These connections help explain the endings alongside climate, markets, alliances and disease.
• Other peoples with different systems replaced both. As Norse settlements withdrew from Greenland, Thule Inuit communities expanded with equipment suited to sea ice. In Mexico, Spanish colonists and Indigenous allies defeated the Mexica state. The colonists brought diseases, livestock and different engineering, and their authorities later changed the lake system. Each environment could support more than one way of life, though each came with its own costs and possibilities.

What it changed

Greenland becomes an Inuit land, then a Danish colony. Inuit communities had spread along Greenland's west and south coasts by about 1500. Danish colonization began in the eighteenth century and shaped the island for two hundred years. Greenland's colonial status ended in 1953; Home Rule followed in 1979 and Self-Government in 2009. In 2017 Kujataa, the farming landscape that includes Hvalsey and is associated with both Norse and Inuit farming, entered the World Heritage list.

The lake becomes a sinking city. One of the world's largest cities grew on the former lake bed. Pumping groundwater compacts its soft clay, and in some places, especially where that clay is thickest, the ground sinks by up to about 50 centimeters a year. Mexico City still faces flooding and water-supply problems. The challenge of living with water in a closed basin has endured for five centuries.

A question for the present. How can societies adapt to a demanding climate, and which responses will last? That question now faces people dealing with climate change. These histories suggest examining whether resources, places, people and institutions spread risk or concentrate it, and whether institutions can change with conditions. Students can test that argument against the evidence and the differences between the cases.