Danish colonisation of Greenland started in 1721, but a Norse colony in west Greenland had already been an outpost of Europeans throughout the period 985–1500 AD. There had been contacts between North American hunters and European farmers. It seems that the Norse community managed quite well for the first 150 years, with a maritime-terrestrial economy with small animal herds, seasonal hunting of walrus, polar bears and seals and occasional trading with Iceland. However, they were living on a knife edge, with great skills being required to survive the long cold winters. There is ample evidence that the Little Ice Age fluctuations in temperature, sea ice conditions and faunal resources put the communities under stress from 1270 AD onwards. Moreover, the southward migration of the indigenous Inuit peoples – in response to climatic change – and the decline in trading relations with Europe further complicated their subsistence strategies. The western settlements seem to have collapsed rather suddenly around 1350 AD.
In this story, it has been argued, one should not treat the human response to climatic stress as a minor and dependent variable. The Inuit peoples survived these harsh times. The Norse farmers had several options to adapt, for instance, orienting themselves more towards the oceanic resources and de-emphasising pasture and cattle-rearing. They also would have benefited from Inuit practises and technology related to boats, fishing gear and clothing. ‘Rather than exploring the possibilities of new technology and searching out alternative resources, Norse society in Greenland seems to have resolutely stuck to its established pattern, elaborating its churches rather than its hunting skills’ (McGovern (1981) 425). Whence this conservatism and loss of adaptive resilience in the face of rising economic costs and declining returns?
Under the influence of Iceland, the mediaeval church in the Norse communities in Greenland had become more powerful spiritually as well as materially in the 12th century. Between 1125 AD and 1300 AD, spectacular church construction had taken place, small communities building amongst the largest stone structures in the Atlantic Islands. Economic, political, religious and ideological authority appears to have come into the hands of a lay and clerical elite. If a society such as this is confronted with increasing fluctuations in resource abundance and use, it has to invest in additional data collection and improve its interpretation of these data in order to survive. This constitutes an overhead cost, which is often resisted by the population and has to be enforced by military force or by ideology.
The elite-sponsored expensive elaboration of ceremonial architecture and ritual paraphernalia in Norse Greenland may indicate the successful ideological conditioning of the population. Administrators may not only have declined Inuit superior technology but also have sustained erroneous beliefs – for example, that lighting candles had more impact on the spring seal hunt than more and better boats. As stresses mounted, elite groups may have pushed up the necessary overheads in their obsession with conformity and the suppression of dissenters and detached themselves farther and farther from the phenomenal world, adding the pathology of hypercoherence to the pathology of auto-mystification.

This story is based on McGovern (1981), The economics of extinction in Norse Greenland (in De Vries and Goudsblom (2002), Mappae Mundi: Humans and their Habitats in a Long-Term Socio-Ecological Perspective, Amsterdam University Press).