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Author: Arnved Nedkvitne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135125958X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
How could a community of 2000–3000 Viking peasants survive in Arctic Greenland for 430 years (ca. 985–1415), and why did they finally disappear? European agriculture in an Arctic environment encountered serious ecological challenges. The Norse peasants faced these challenges by adapting agricultural practices they had learned from the Atlantic and North Sea coast of Norway. Norse Greenland was the stepping stone for the Europeans who first discovered America and settled briefly in Newfoundland ca. AD 1000. The community had a global significance which surpassed its modest size. In the last decades scholars have been nearly unanimous in emphasising that long-term climatic and environmental changes created a situation where Norse agriculture was no longer sustainable and the community was ruined. A secondary hypothesis has focused on ethnic confrontations between Norse peasants and Inuit hunters. In the last decades ethnic violence has been on the rise in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa. In some cases it has degenerated into ethnic cleansing. This has strengthened the interest in ethnic violence in past societies. Challenging traditional hypotheses is a source of progress in all science. The present book does this on the basis of relevant written and archaeological material respecting the methodology of both sciences.
Author: Arnved Nedkvitne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135125958X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Get Book
Book Description
How could a community of 2000–3000 Viking peasants survive in Arctic Greenland for 430 years (ca. 985–1415), and why did they finally disappear? European agriculture in an Arctic environment encountered serious ecological challenges. The Norse peasants faced these challenges by adapting agricultural practices they had learned from the Atlantic and North Sea coast of Norway. Norse Greenland was the stepping stone for the Europeans who first discovered America and settled briefly in Newfoundland ca. AD 1000. The community had a global significance which surpassed its modest size. In the last decades scholars have been nearly unanimous in emphasising that long-term climatic and environmental changes created a situation where Norse agriculture was no longer sustainable and the community was ruined. A secondary hypothesis has focused on ethnic confrontations between Norse peasants and Inuit hunters. In the last decades ethnic violence has been on the rise in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa. In some cases it has degenerated into ethnic cleansing. This has strengthened the interest in ethnic violence in past societies. Challenging traditional hypotheses is a source of progress in all science. The present book does this on the basis of relevant written and archaeological material respecting the methodology of both sciences.
Author: Arnved Nedkvitne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367585808
Category : Peasants
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The initial settlement in AD 985/6 -- Political organisation -- Church and religion -- Trade and shipping -- Subsistence food production -- One land: two societies.
Author: Alexis S. Troubetzkoy
Publisher: Dundurn
ISBN: 1554888557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
From early medieval times to the twenty-first century, what is the beguiling draw of the north? What manner of men boldly ventured into those hostile and unpredictable regions? Todays Arctic is developing into tomorrows hotspot.
Author: Fridtjof Nansen
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 857
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Book Description
"In Northern Mists" is one of the best-known works by a Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen. This carefully crafted DigiCat ebook is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Volume 1: Antiquity, Before Pytheas Pytheas of Massalia: the Voyage to Thule Antiquity, After Pytheas The Early Middle Ages The Awakening of Mediæval Knowledge of the North Finns, Skridfinns (Lapps), and the First Settlement of Scandinavia The Voyages of the Norsemen: Discovery of Iceland and Greenland Voyages to the Uninhabited Parts of Greenland in the Middle Ages Wineland the Good, the Fortunate Isles, and the Discovery of America... Volume 2: Wineland the Good, the Fortunate Isles, and the Discovery of America Eskimo and Skræling The Decline of the Norse Settlements in Greenland Expeditions of the Norwegians to the White Sea, Voyages in the Polar Sea, Whaling and Sealing The North in Maps and Geographical Works of the Middle Ages John Cabot and the English Discovery of North America The Portuguese Discoveries in the North-West...
Author: Knut Gjerset
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Northmen
Languages : en
Pages : 1276
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Book Description
Author: James Robert Enterline
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
ISBN: 0801875471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524
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Book Description
This revealing analysis of Medieval cartography and native American travel upends conventional narratives about discovering the New World. For generations, American schools have taught children that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. But evidence shows that Leif Erikson set foot on the continent centuries earlier. As debate continues over which explorer deserves the credit, early maps of North America suggest that we may be asking the wrong questions. How did medieval Europeans have such specific geographic knowledge of North America, a land even their most daring adventurers had not yet discovered? In Erikson, Eskimos, and Columbus, James Robert Enterline presents new evidence that traces this knowledge to the cartographic skills of indigenous people of the high Arctic, who, he contends, provided the basis for medieval maps of large parts of North America. Drawing on an exhaustive chronological survey of pre-Columbian maps, including the controversial Yale Vinland Map, this book boldly challenges conventional accounts of Europe’s discovery of the New World.
Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141976969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608
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Book Description
From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times
Author: Brian Fagan
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541618572
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Only in the last decade have climatologists developed an accurate picture of yearly climate conditions in historical times. This development confirmed a long-standing suspicion: that the world endured a 500-year cold snap -- The Little Ice Age -- that lasted roughly from A.D. 1300 until 1850. The Little Ice Age tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable and often very cold years of modern European history, how climate altered historical events, and what they mean in the context of today's global warming. With its basis in cutting-edge science, The Little Ice Age offers a new perspective on familiar events. Renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan shows how the increasing cold affected Norse exploration; how changing sea temperatures caused English and Basque fishermen to follow vast shoals of cod all the way to the New World; how a generations-long subsistence crisis in France contributed to social disintegration and ultimately revolution; and how English efforts to improve farm productivity in the face of a deteriorating climate helped pave the way for the Industrial Revolution and hence for global warming. This is a fascinating, original book for anyone interested in history, climate, or the new subject of how they interact.
Author: Robert McGhee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780226500898
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
An account of life in the Arctic through human history. Describes early doomed expeditions and the work of fur traders, ivory hunters, and whalers.
Author: Else Østergård
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
One of the century's most spectacular archaeological finds occurred in 1921, a year before Howard Carter stumbled upon Tutankhamun's tomb, when Poul Norlund recovered dozens of garments from a graveyard in the Norse settlement of Herjolfsnaes, Greenland. Preserved intact for centuries by the permafrost, these mediaeval garments display remarkable similarities to western European costumes of the time. Previously, such costumes were known only from contemporary illustrations, and the Greenland finds provided the world with a close look at how ordinary Europeans dressed in the Middle Ages. Fortunately for Norlund's team, wood has always been extremely scarce in Greenland, and instead of caskets, many of the bodies were found swaddled in multiple layers of cast off clothing. When he wrote about the excavation later, Norlund also described how occasional thaws had permitted crowberry and dwarf willow to establish themselves in the top layers of soil. Their roots grew through coffins, clothing and corpses alike, binding them together in a vast network of thin fibers - as if, he wrote, the finds had been literally sewn in the earth. Eighty years of technical advances and subsequent excavations have greatly added to our understanding of the Herjolfsnaes discoveries. Woven into the Earth recounts the dramatic story of Norlund's excavation in the context of other Norse textile finds in Greenland. It then describes what the finds tell us about the materials and methods used in making the clothes. The weaving and sewing techniques detailed here are surprisingly sophisticated, and one can only admire the talent of the women who employed them, especially considering the harsh conditions they worked under. While Woven into the Earth will be invaluable to students of medieval archaeology, Norse society and textile history, both lay readers and scholars are sure to find the book's dig narratives and glimpses of life among the last Vikings fascinating.
