Gone Medieval - The Norse Walrus Ivory Trade Crash

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

The first of Greenland’s Viking settlements were established in the tenth century. But by the fifteenth century, they had all but vanished, their fate confounding generations of archaeologists. But new research has revealed that it was the trade in walrus ivory that was behind both their prosperity and decline.In this edition of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman talks to Professor James Barrett, to discuss an enterprise that traversed East and West, but ultimately crashed as stocks ran out and elephant ivory became more accessible.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Thomas Ntinas and produced by Rob Weinberg. For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. One thing we know about the medieval period is that it was a time when trade across not just Europe, but also the wider world, began to reach something we could call globalization. How far did these trading connections go and what did they mean for the people and societies behind them? This week we're talking about this and a very specific commodity that was highly prized in medieval society, which brand new research now shows travelled vast distances connecting east and west,

and a commodity that may have had an essential role in the settlement and disappearance of an island community. I'm talking about the trade in walrus ivory, and not least the impact it had on the settlers of Greenland. So today I'm delighted to hear with me. James Barrett, who is a professor of medieval and environmental archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Cultural History at the NTNU University Museum in Tronheim, Norway. James, thank you so much for joining me here today. It's a pleasure. Now, I just have to ask, first of all,

because when somebody goes onto your university website, it lists one of your main specialisms as ecological globalization. I just wanted to ask you, can you explain to us what that means and how that relates to the medieval periods? Well, really, it's just about the spatial displacement of our relationship with nature, which, of course, in historical time, has unfolded, where we utilise ever more distant resources. And that process has several important historical implications. The first is on the environment itself.

It's often associated with serial depletion where using a resource, which is closer, gradually depletes it to the point where it becomes desirable to try to find resources further and farther away. And of course, this is the process we're very, very familiar with in the 20th and 21st century, but it's something which we can also observe in much deeper time archaeologically and historically. And the other thing that this does, of course, is it creates linkages between very, very distant places, so creates linkages between centers of consumption, often urban centers of consumption, also potentially elite centers of consumption in the countryside, and very, very distant method experts who are really the specialists in procuring these resources,

specialist hunters. You know, sometimes these are indigenous communities, sometimes these are rural communities. From the point of view of the urban centers are far-flung places. Of course, sometimes knowledge travels with these objects. Sometimes the objects travel rather divorced from the knowledge that the method experts have. of the classic example of which is Narwhal Tuska, which was perceived as unicorn, when it's ultimately arrived in Europe. It really does give us an insight into the relationship between people and their environment

over the long term and provides, in some cases, cautionary tales, in other cases, just a way to understand the way that our relationship with the environment has unfolded and continues to unfold. Now, one of the sort of areas that you look at specifically is marine resources, and that can be fish, also what we're going to be talking about today, so the walrus ivory. So I want to just go straight into that because that does exactly all these things that you just mentioned now. It taps into so many different types of knowledge, doesn't it, of these societies and cultures. But I wanted to just ask you, first of all, if we think about the medieval period,

can you just tell us a little bit, how was walrus ivory used in the medieval period? They used depended a little bit on where and when you were, but it could be amongst precious materials that would be associated in bounds of precious metals, gold for instance, for objects that they carried the most tense ideological power, reliquaries, for instance, or religious items like bishops or rabbits, croziers, or crucifixes. And this was particularly the case in the most distant locations in the earliest period of its introduction. In places where the ivory was trans-ship, you know, centres of trade, places like Trondheim, medieval Nideros, Dublin, Schleswig and modern-A-Germity, medieval Denmark, Bergen.

And these kinds of places, it was more abundant. So it could be used for very, very fine objects. Most famously, of course, Lewis Chesman, probably made in Trondheim, but it was also used for fine versions of more everyday objects, knife handles, gaming pieces. So it did depend a little bit on where and when you were. And also, as one reaches the end of the main period of Walrus ivory trade, which peaked in the 12th century in the 1100s when it was very popular for small-scale sculpture in Roman escarred. Elephant ivory began to appear in greater amounts in Europe in the 12th

in the 13th century, and Walrus ivory clearly began to lose its value. It was still used, but less so when it was clearly worth a lot less after that point. So there were times that it was exceptionally valuable, times that it was less valuable in places where, of course, its exact use vary, depending on its abundance as rarity. Do we know when it starts to come in? So you said if the 12th centuries is a highlight of the trade, when does it come in? That's an interesting question because most famously, there's an extraordinary account that dates to the very end of the 800s

in which there is an Arctic Norwegian chieftain described as a source as Ulthira, who visits the court of Alfred the Great in southern England, and actually describes his journey and where he lives and his life. And this is actually recorded in a contemporary document, which is recounting an earlier source of the history of the world. And it refers to the trade walrus tusks in Arctic, Norway, or possibly in northern Russia, the Kola Peninsula, for instance, and with the Sami people. And it records the fact that Altheir brought some of these as gifts for King Alfred. So we know that this trade was going on in the 9th century. There are very, very small number of walrus ivory artifacts that survive from northwestern Europe, dating to that period, the 9th and 10th.

centuries. We've always rather imagine that that was the beginning. But if one actually carries out a systematic survey the surviving pieces of Walrus Ivory, then one discovers is that the number of pieces of that date is extremely small. And it only begins to be imported to Europe on a substantial scale in the years right around 1,000 AD, which possibly not coincidentally is just after the initial settlement of Greenland. And that it really peaks. There's a real boom and bus site. cycle, you know, almost sort of classic, as in crash and popularity, as we see in so many commodities through time and space, in the 12th century, as we've just discussed.

And then it does really peter out after that, particularly in England and the continent. It has a kind of afterlife of continued use in Scandinavia and in Eastern Europe, but it's much less used after that. So can you just give us a little bit of the basics on the distribution of walrus, for those of us who might not be quite so into world world world world. ecology. Where was it found at this point in time? It's a really good question because there's a significant likelihood of changes in distribution through time. And we might expect that partly due to human impact over exploitation and disturbance of walrus holots and partly due to the possibility of changes due to

climate change. And this is something that myself and my colleagues have looked into in some detail and also other teams that have done very important work in Iceland, for instance. And the first observation is that on the whole, walruses are denizens of the sea ice. So they have a circumpolar distribution. And the nice thing about walrus ivory, if you're studying ecological globalization, is that if you find a piece in London for the sake of argument, that you know it probably hasn't come from the North Sea, you know, that it's come a long way and probably from the Arctic. The question is, how far south did walruses come in different parts of the distribution? And it's a very valid question, because there was actually a population of warruses that

came very far south, as far south as Nova Scotia, for instance, in the east coast of North America that was hunted out in colonial times. And so we might therefore ask, is it conceivable that walrus has also came much farther south in Europe in historical times before they were hunted, albeit out an earlier day. But the research seems to show that that on the whole isn't the case, that this maritime walrus that was so much farther south in North America is a very distinct, genetically distinct and in other ways distinct population, which wasn't associated with the ice and the way that Atlantic Walruses are everywhere else.

So that's the first thing. We can rule out the likelihood that walruses were very far south in Europe in earlier centuries. And then the second thing is, so, you know, okay, accepting that, where were they? And what we can observe, based on the archaeological and to a lesser degree, the historical record, is that they were certainly in Iceland

at the time of the initial Norse settlement. But in Iceland, they were very, very quickly hunted out after land now within a couple of centuries probably. And secondly, that in northern Norway, where they're really very, very rare today, in the past, there was a walrus population that lived on a little island in the middle of the Barents Sea called Bair Island or Biornoia. And when that population existed, it was hunted out in the middle of the 1800s. But when it existed, that of course walruses move around and that they were far more common in what we now call Finbark in the northernmost Norway. So it would have.

have been possible in the Middle Ages to hunt them in Northern Norway. But even then, the number of bones, for instance, that we find even in prehistoric sites where there are lots of seals being harvested, walrus remains are very, very, very rare. You just mentioned early on this point around the turn of the millenniums, around 1,000, and also Greenland. So let's go on to that, because that becomes the key part of the story, really, doesn't it? So Greenland is settled around about this time, right at the end of the 900s, really. How much do you think Walrus and the hunt for Walrus was a part of that settlement? It was extremely important for the Norris Colony of Greenland

to maintain contact with Iceland and with Europe. And particularly after the period when the North Greenlanders had their own ships, they needed an export product in order to maintain that. And the main export product, we know from historic sources, as well as being able to infer it archaeologically, were those derived from the walrus. And there are really two main products.

We talk about the walrus ivory because that's what survives. But we know from contemporary historical sources that Walrus hide ropes were also very, very highly valid. They were the strongest ropes that existed in the time period used for the very heaviest of lifting tasks. So they were used for some aspects of ship rigging, and they were used for things like the securing of church bells.

And there's even a source from the 13th century referring to them being on the market in Kohl in Germany, in addition to these being referred to in many Scandinavian sources, the Middle Ages. So Walrus products were very highly vows. They were really essential for the economic survival in terms of long-range trade with Europe of Norse Greenland. But if one wants to look at things at a finer scale with greater detail, then it's really valuable to always remember that there were two Norse colonies in Greenland. Very closely related, of course.

There was the so-called eastern colony, which was in the southeast tip really, and the so-called Western settlement in President of Newk. And they had quite different economies. And the Western settlement, which was the first to disappear, probably in the middle of the 1300s, was situated at the time of its creation. What was the southern limit of the distribution of walruses in Western Greenland? Quite quickly, it seems as in Iceland, the walruses in that area were probably depleted, and the main area of walrus hunting in Norse Greenland was much farther north around Disco Bay. The entire existence, one might argue, of the Western settlement, was about the warrants. Walrus Hunt, whereas Eastern Settlement had a much more diversified economy to a much greater degree, dependent on pastoral agriculture, for instance, and lasted longer. So to give a simple answer,

you know, how important were Walrusists to the North settlements of Greenland? But they're very important. If one were to give a more detailed answer, they were probably extremely important, possibly even the reason for its existence, when one's talking about the Western settlement, but less crucial in terms of the Eastern settlement, and that importance potentially becomes very relevant to the difference in the timing of the abandoned of those settlements. So we studied how these products are being used over time and where they come from, but also the distribution internationally. So what methods do you actually use to study what happens to this Walrus trade over the years? You know, archaeology has quite a diverse toolkit.

And some of the traditional methods remain very powerful. And of course, there are also new methods which significantly increase our ability to answer old questions in new ways. But to start with some of the traditional methods, what we were able to discover is that the walrus ivory was actually traded as tusks in pairs still attached to the front of the walrus skull. And this created a very convenient package. The end of the tusks is inside the skull is actually hollow and therefore potentially subject of breakage. And so shipping them left in the front of the skull was a good practical solution. and when one looks long and hard enough in places where there are walrus ivory workshops in northwestern Europe,

one will often find pieces of these walrus skulls that have been broken up during the extraction of the tusks. Because it's just the front of the skull, they've been removed, of course, and in fact in many cases they've been modified in other ways, almost decorated with a kind of folk art. And one can apply traditional artifact analysis methodologies to these objects in order to see the operational sequence, the series of events, that occurred in the specific way that they were modified. Analysis allows us to identify a particular school, if you like, of working this material.

We sometimes call it a community of practice, just a group of people who are doing things in similar ways where it's not like they've invented this independently. They're probably in communication with each other. And traditionally, when one has an artifact type in archaeology, we use that to infer a potential location of manufacture. This type came from somewhere. Of course, the issue is that it's possible to copy what people do

So we know, for instance, that these methods of modification were used in Greenland. So we might infer that these skulls were coming from Greenland just from this archaeological analysis, this artificial analysis in its own right. But of course, it could be copied elsewhere. So then if one would like to provenance this material, one can apply stable isotope methods. It's an analysis of isotopes in the protein from the material, which ultimately relate to the diet and environment in which the animal originally lived, you know, that specific animal. And we can also apply ancient DNA methods, which refers to the ultimate ancestry of the animal.

And in that case, it's possible to identify two broad groups of Atlantic walruses, excluding the Maritime Swarrowas we talked about before. And one of those groups is uniquely distributed in Western Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic. The farther north you go in Western Greenland, the more prevalent this particular genetic group is, as haplotype is. The other group is widely distributed occurs in Arctic Europe and all the way across eastern Greenland, but in fact also occurs in Western Greenland and in the Eastern Canadian Arctic. The short version of that is that there's one haplotype, the Western haplotype, that if you have it, you know the specimen, if it's medieval, has probably come through the North Colony of Greenland. And the other haplotype you just don't know.

But if you combine the studies of the stable isotopes that indicates the environment in which the walrus lived, with the ancient DNA data, then one can begin to tease apart potentially where that, why the distributed group comes as well. And if you combine that with the artificial study of the way in which the skulls have been modified, then the three together are in fact really quite powerful. And you can give quite a convincing explanation as to the source of the material. And now you have noticed that I'm talking specifically about the walrus skulls here. And the reason for that is partly pragmatic and ethical.

and it's the fact that these walrus skulls are large, they're broken up, they're only slightly modified by human craft, and so it's quite reasonable to sample these for what are ultimately, even although the samples are small, destructive analyses, stable isotopes and ancient DNA, for instance, where we might not wish to do that on very small, very fine ivory artifacts. In many ways, it was the discovery of these walrus skulls that opened up the possibility for this kind of research.

Did you know that some of literature's greatest characters were real people? It's so fascinating, isn't it, that some of the Three Musketeers are also based on real soldiers? That Sir Walter Raleigh wasn't all that he's been cracked up to be. Chemist, poets, scholar, historian, courtier. He could have been great in all these different things. And that if your name is Dudley, you better watch your back. For the tutors, each one of them took some. something from the Dudleys, either by working with a member of the Dudley family or, of course,

by having one executed. I'm Professor Susanna Lipskin, and I'm learning all this and much more bringing you, Not Just the Tudors, twice a week, every week. Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. I want to go on to one of your very recent studies that only came out a few months ago, because you got involved in looking at some ivory artefacts, that had turned up in Kiev in Ukraine and asked to have a look at the origins of this. And obviously, this is very far east in those trading networks that we've talked about just now.

So tell me what were those objects and what did you find out from that study? Yes, this was quite a surprise. In previous work, I made an effort to tabulate how many of these walrus skulls we know of in Europe and came up with a total of about 67. These are medieval examples.

And then through a colleague working in the archaeology of Kiev, Natalia Kamenko, came to my attention that there were actually nine walrus skulls discovered an archaeological excavation in Kiev, right in a trading settlement of the 1100s, really right on the river. And this was extraordinary. May one doesn't expect to find walruses on the Naipur River. They're a little bit far from home, and certainly not from the 1100s. So this was amazing. So I went out to look at them. Nataya and I looked at them together, and we conducted the analyses on these skulls of the kind that I've just described, as we had previously done in the Northwestern European examples.

And the reason why these particular skulls are so very important is because of their date and their location. And to provide the context, first, Kiev was a very, very major urban center of the day, a central turntable of trade between Europe and Northwestern Europe, Scandinavia and Byzantium, and also into Asia. And the second is that the single largest known collection of Walrus Ivory from the Middle Ages is from another Eastern European city Novgorod, which is on the river trade routes between Scandinavia and in fact also the Arctic Russian north and Kiev. So if you know where the material from Kiev came from, then you can infer where the material from

Novgorod probably came from. And the last is given its position as a turntable trade between Scandinavian Europe and Byzantia. and the East, then you can also make some potential inferences. Obviously, here one is in more speculative territory about the source of Walrus Ivory that it's known was also traveling to Byzantium and into Asia. So it's quite important to know where these are from. And it has always been assumed completely understandably that the Eastern European Walrus finds, like the ivory from Novgorod, was probably from Arctic Russia.

This is firstly because they're a much more approximate source. And secondly, because there are Arabic accounts which specifically refer to the Asian sourcing of Walrus Ivory from what are now Ukraine and Russia. And of course, the inference of that is that it was harvested in what's now Russia in addition to having passed through. So this is past sensible assumptions. And so when we studied these or when we first went to study these, our expectation was that these would prove to be from the Barron Sea, for instance, the Carra Sea. But immediately on looking at them, it was clear that they were modified in the same way as the other northwestern European

examples, which we had demonstrated based on isotopes and DNA were almost certainly from Greenland. So there was an immediate hint that these look Greenlanding. So then we carried out the ancient DNA and stable isotope analysis. And at this point, we were now into COVID, so we had to wait a little while for the labs to reopen. But then we got the results back, and they were. There were nine skulls. They're from nine individual warruses, and it was possible to conduct DNA and isotope analysis on seven of those. Five of the seven or of the Western DNA group that really has to have come from Western Greenland or the Eastern Canadian Arctic. The other two of the clade where you just can't tell, so they could be from Europe, but they could equally have been West Greenland as well.

Isotopically, they're all consistent with being from Greenland, but we can't completely exclude based on the isotopes, Iceland, for example. And when you combine this with a way that they're modified, then one can be confident that at least a majority are Greenlandic. So that really changes the way that we understand the nature of the trade quite fundamentally and means that potentially the entirety of Eurasian demand for Morris Ivory in the 1100s, you know, this peak in its exploitation I referred to is actually focused on the Norse colony of Greenland. And that was a big surprise. And it also has potentially non-trivial, you know, wider implications. Absolutely, because that is quite staggering. If you could just look at the

map and look at those sort of extensive distances, but the routes and the networks that are functioning so well at that point to be able to sustain all of that. That's quite a staggering result, isn't it? It was a big surprise. I wanted to also go a little bit back to what you were talking about a bit earlier. So this is showing that you've got this huge demand. You've got and a supply, I suppose, at this point in time, at the peak that goes so far. But you've been looking at these changes over time, because as we now know very well in our current world, these resources are not infinite and things happen over time if you do overexploit them. So in terms of looking at that development then and that sort of continuing, what did you find over time as it

got sort of closer to the end of the period where this was used? Here was another surprise. And this is speaking not just about Kia, but more holistically about the study of all of the finds of these walrus skulls in eastern and northwestern Europe. And the background a little bit has to keep in mind that there was this boom and bust that we can see based on the dating of Walrus Iberts-Sibery artifacts in Europe, where there was a real crash when moved into the 1200s and 13-100s. And of course, we know that North Greenland was abandoned, the Western settlement in the 13-100s and the eastern settlement very shortly thereafter. And traditionally, Walrus Iber or that Walrus Hunt has been considered to be part of this bigger story. And it's

been suggested that the introduction of elephant ivory into Western Europe on a large scale in the 1200s meant that walrus ivory was no longer valued. Therefore, the trade declined, and with the decline of the trade, perhaps the economic viability of the Norse colonies of Greenland declined. This was a quite sensible argument, and I was very persuaded by it at the time, but when we started to study the chronology of these walrus skulls and the characteristics of these skulls, several unanticipated results came out. And the first was that they continued into the 1300s. The second is that they got smaller through time, with the smallest examples being in the 1300s. And the last is that through time, an increasing proportion of them were of this Western

ancient DNA group, which is more common the farther north one goes in northwestern Greenland. So, when looks at that evidence together, what it looks like in a very, very straightforward way, is an example of serial depletion, where one starts off, obviously, if you're after tusks, hunting the largest walruses closer to hand, and as one moves forward in time, one has to hunt smaller and smaller animals in order to keep up with demand, and one has to hunt them further and further away, farther north along the west coast of Greenland. And if one combines this with some really quite remarkable archaeological evidence that's been known about for a long time, but it's never really been satisfactorily explained. Starting in the

1,200s, there are actually artifacts from the north colonies of Greenland in the very, very far north of northwestern Greenland and also in Ellesmere Island, cross Missound in the eastern Canadian Arctic. These are really from the start in the 1200s, maybe moving into the 1300s, and people are going exceptionally far north. And really, when one's talking to Elsmuir Island, I mean, this is as far north as humans inhabited the planet of the date, essentially. And these are found in indigenous Inuit, to the Inuit sites. It, of course, quite sensibly been suggested that perhaps this is trade between the Norse and the Inuit, and one of those most likely products of that trade, of course, is Lower's Ivory.

So it would seem, if we put all of this evidence together, the Norse colonists in Greenland really were beginning to have to go to exceptional lengths in order to procure, not exceptional because of trade with the indigenous community. It's perfectly sensible, but in terms of the distances involved. from the eastern-western settlement all the way to Smith Sound. And this was arguably not a sustainable endeavor. And in fact, in one of the sites in Ellesmere Island, there are ship-rivits and shipplanks.

So it's quite clear that one didn't always come back from these expeditions. So here we have a case of serial depletion at exactly the time that in the theory, the Walrus ivory trade should have been stopping because elephant ivory was replacing it in Europe. And we had to put those things together. And, of course, quite quickly it does make sense, because what the historical sources from Europe are telling us is that walrus ivory was less valued from the late 1200s, for example.

We have particular correspondence between the Pope and the Archbishop in Trondheim, for instance, it says as much. So if walrus ivory is worth less, but you're in Norse Greenland and you still need to maintain your connection with Europe, then rather than hunting fewer walruses, of course it means you have to hunt more because each tusk is worse less in order to maintain your balance of trade. So it would seem that the walrus hunt actually increased rather than decreased with the introduction of elephant ivory into Europe and that one has this case of serial depletion

where the walrises of Greenland are under very, very serious pressure. And finding the Kiev skulls helps to understand how that could be so because the geographical scale of demand that is focused on that Western Greenlandic population is Eurasian. You know, Scandinavia doesn't just northwestern Europe. It is really, certainly the whole of Western and Eastern Europe. And because of the trade linkages of Kiev, then really the whole of Eurasian, that helps us understand this result of this process of ecological globalization at such an early day. So, I mean, it's so exciting to see that impact that this trade had on all of Europe. So what about the Ullors now? Did it get completely endangered? Or is there still a sort of sustainable use of warrants? in Greenland especially? Absolutely. And one of the nice things about studying the history of Walrus exploitation

about this particular case study is that in the long term, in many ways, it's a success story because walrus is in various parts of their range. In Svalbard, for instance, the Bairnsia, and also in Greenland, have in modern times been very successfully managed and have viable and sustainable populations. In the long term, of course, when asked to ask what the implications of changes in sea ice,

distribution will be for the walrus but at present we're very fortunate that this extraordinary arctic animal is still with us that's fantastic it's quite rare isn't it to be almost a success story at the end wonderful and just for our listeners out there i know that you can look up james's research papers i think they're all open access these recent papers aren't they yes absolutely so if you just search for james barrett and walrus ivory trade that's probably the easiest way of finding the details if you want all the nuts and bolts of it. But James, that's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for joining me and sharing your expertise with us. Thank you very much, Kat. So this brings us to the end of today's episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Don't forget that you can subscribe to the podcast.

Please do so. Please tell all your friends and family to listen to us as well. And you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just look in the episode notes for how to do that. And we will be back again with another episode on Saturday and the following next Tuesday. today. Thank you all so much for listening.