Norse Greenland settlements

Record summary

The Norse settlements in Greenland, traditionally associated with Erik the Red’s colonization around the late tenth century, include the Eastern and Western settlements, farms, churches, and episcopal institutions. Their eventual disappearance has been studied through climate change, sea-ice conditions, economic shifts, livestock practices, and changing relations with Inuit communities. This is a useful late-medieval comparison case because it joins documentary tradition with archaeology and environmental evidence while resisting single-cause explanations. The chronology of abandonment and the weight of each factor remain active research questions.