exploited, with seal, seabird and fish forming a significant component of the diet, and
a similar pattern has recently emerged from the Faroese data (Church et al. 2005 ). In
Greenland, fish are remarkably rare in the middens, but reindeer (caribou), particularly
in the more northerly Western Settlement, provided an important dietary component,
supplemented by seal, seabirds and the occasional stranded whale. The distribution of
animal bones on sites shows that all farms contributed to the communal hunt, although
dispersal of the results was not always equitable (McGovern et al. 1996 ).
Iceland plugs early into mainland Europe’s need for stockfish to sustain standing
armies and urban growth, supplementing and partly replacing sources in the Lofoten
islands of Arctic Norway (Perdikaris 1999 ), but Greenland’s trade in prestige goods,
walrus ivory, its hide for making ropes and the intermittent polar bear (exchanged for a
bishop in Einar Sokkasson’s saga) and unicorn horn (narwhal) was always subject to the
fluctuating supply from other sources to the east and south, and it was never effectively
integrated into the European world system. Survival at a level close to subsistence,
however, did not need contact for anything beyond the spiritual, but it did require an
ability to provide sufficient fodder to overwinter core domestic stock. Its importance
is indicated in the tale of Iceland’s failed first settler, Nadodd, who found the hunting of
marine resources so good that he neglected to collect fodder for his animals. Come the
winter, natural resources disappeared and a disappointed Nadodd returned to Norway,
with a poor report of the new land, which he consequently christened Iceland; Eirik the
Red’s sales pitch on Greenland shows a similar concern. The didactic nature of these
foundation myths is evident – the neurosis of any northern farmer is whether he has
sufficient fodder for his animals for the winter (cf. Jónsson 1877 ). Archaeological and
palaeoecological data provide evidence for the storage of fodder (Amorosi et al. 1998 ),
represented not only by the preservation of seeds in anaerobic conditions on archaeo-
logical sites but also by the extensive synanthropic insect faunas, largely species which
feed on slime moulds on the decaying hay and their predators, introduced with the first
settlers, including many species which are only able to survive in the artificially warmed
habitats created by humans in the turf houses of farms and byres and the decaying
plant debris in middens (Sadler and Skidmore 1995 ). Despite extensive burning in both
Iceland and Greenland to convert birch and willow woodland and scrub to grassland,
twig and leaf hay remained an important element in the diet of much stock, and the
larger numbers of goats in Greenland may as much reflect their greater ability to
metabolise woody tissue as the fact that woollen cloth (ON vaðmál) formed a lesser
element in its taxation. At the Gården under Sandet (GUS) site in the Western Settlement
in Greenland, the pollen spectra of faecal pellets of sheep or goat contain up to 98 per
cent birch, perhaps reflecting spring collection of additional fodder (personal informa-
tion from Robert Craigie, Dept. of Archaeology, University of Sheffield).
The use of seaweed as animal fodder, and as a source of salt, is evident on sites from
Orkney to Greenland, and in organic deposits where the alga itself does not survive, its
presence is often indicated by the remains of the marine colonial epizoote Dynamena
pumila, which lives attached to it (Buckland et al. 1993 ). The presence of littoral
elements in beetle faunas and puparia of flies which live in the debris thrown up on the
tide line in middens and house floors further stresses the supplementation of terrestrial
with marine resources, and the marine component of human and animal diet is also
evident in the isotope composition of human and animal bone (Arneborg et al. 1999 ).
Charred fragments of wrack are not uncommon even on inland sites (Buckland et al.
–– chapter 43 ( 1 ): The North Atlantic farm––