Norse Greenland settlements and abandonment

Record summary

Norse communities established farming settlements in Greenland from the late tenth century and later disappeared from the archaeological record. Research combines churches, farms, middens, ice-core climate data, written sources and marine-resource studies to assess the roles of cooling climate, changing trade, land-use pressure, disease and social adaptation. The lead matters for comparing migration limits, frontier resilience and the dangers of single-cause collapse narratives. Uncertainty remains over the relative importance of climate deterioration, economic isolation and local choices in the settlements’ final centuries.