Archaeology of Learning in the Little Ice Age

Sissarluttoq, just southwest of the Inuit settlement of Igaliku, contains some of the best-preserved Norse ruins in Greenland. Photo by Ciril Jazbec, published in Folger, Tim (March 2017), Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish? Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/, accessed Feb. 11, 2025.

By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative

Greenland and the US Dept. of Education have been in the news recently, linked by expressions of intent from the US executive for acquisition and dismantling respectively. But new archaeological research has brought together evidence of a deeper bond between the Arctic nation and teaching of children, providing a critically useful view of how different approaches to learning can support or undermine adaptation to a changing climate. 

The researchers have brought together multiple lines of evidence – artifacts, history, and ethnographic information – that they use to compare childhood learning practices between the  Norse Viking and Inuit communities of medieval Greenland (10th-15th centuries CE). In short, they’ve built an archaeology of toys. This shows that for the Norse, childhood learning was instructional, structured by age, and focused on routines of farms, with a notable absence of play related to wild resources and hunting. For the Inuit, childhood learning followed a learn-by-discovery approach, with children observing and exploring adult activities from an early age and few discernible boundaries between nature and culture.  

Climatic fluctuations now known as the Little Ice Age began in the 13th century. Storm patterns and Icelandic volcanic eruptions stretched conditions in Greenland outside those under which the Norse settlements – and their teaching traditions – had been established. Many factors contributed to the end of the Greenland Norse settlements in the 15th century. But the contrast with the Inuit, whose skills and teaching attended to the whole of their environment and tracking of change, and who comprise approximately 90% of the population of Greenland today, is one to consider deeply. 

We are now at a point climatically where the past is not a guide to future conditions. But the archaeology of toys is a small powerful reminder that how children learn how to learn their environments can have outcomes across generations.

Featured Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378024000827

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or opinions of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.