Archaeologists Find Clues to Viking Mystery
Archaeologists Find Clues to Viking Mystery
By Günther Stockinger, SPIEGEL
Jan. 9, 2013
Ruins of Hvalsey Church, Hvalsey, Qaqortoq, Greenland. (Getty Images)
For years, researchers have puzzled over why Viking descendents abandoned Greenland in the late 15th century. But archaeologists now believe that economic and identity issues, rather than starvation and disease, drove them back to their ancestral homes.
On Sept. 14, 1408, Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Björnsdottir were married. The ceremony took place in a church on Hvalsey Fjord in Greenland that was only five meters (about 16 feet) tall.
~snip~
The marriage of the Icelander and the girl from Greenland was one of the last raucous festivals in the far northern Viking colony. It all ended soon afterwards, when the last oil lamps went out in the Nordic settlements in Greenland.
The descendants of the Vikings had persevered in their North Atlantic outpost for almost 500 years, from the end of the 10th century until the mid-15th century. The Medieval Warm Period had made it possible for settlers from Norway, Iceland and Denmark to live on hundreds of scattered farms along the protected fjords, where they built dozens of churches and even had bishops.
More:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/archaeologists-find-clues-viking-mystery/story?id=18183196
= new reply since forum marked as read