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16 SEPTEMBER 1408 · CLIMATE AND INNOVATION: THE NORSE AND THE AZTECS, C. 790–1521
The moment in context
A change in diet gives us a way to see the Norse response to cold. Isotopes are chemical signatures in bone that indicate whether a person’s dietary protein came from land or sea. Jette Arneborg’s team estimated that marine food supplied about 20 percent at settlement and about 80 percent near the end. A later study of 123 skeletons placed the early share between 15 and 50 percent and found that it passed 50 percent in the late thirteenth century.
Why it happened — Cooler and drier summers cut the hay. Gifford Miller’s team dates the abrupt beginning of the Little Ice Age to about 1275–1300 and another intensification to 1430–1455. At Lake 578 in…
The turn — Hvalsey church, 16 September 1408. Þorsteinn Ólafsson and Sigríður Björnsdóttir married in Hvalsey’s stone church on 16 September 1408. Their record survived because they later needed…
What it changed — Greenland becomes Inuit land. By about 1500 Inuit communities occupied much of Greenland’s west and south coasts, including the former Norse districts. The map’s blue zones trace…
