[John Wills]

Question: Has there been any weapons found in Greenland dating from the time of the early settlers, in particular axes and spearheads? If there is where can I get information or see photos?

I have been able to find plenty of information about turf built houses, deforestation of what few trees there were, global cooling preventing the growing of barley but almost no photos or descriptions of finds and particularly not weapon finds. I can't believe they lived there for around 400 years without a spear or a wood axe.

[Sam Barris]

I don't know of any pictures, but from what I've read the few artifacts that survived had been worn and sharpened down to nubbins. They lost the ability to smelt iron and could not trade for it, therefore they ceased to be an Iron Age society.

If you're interested, Jared Diamond's Collapse contains an excellent overview of the colony's decline, and gives special attention to how the technological aspects of their culture unraveled.

[Peter Lyon]

What Sam said.

Greenland was in a warm phase when the settlers landed and got worse afterwards, eventually causing more sea ice so that ships had a hard time getting there, and eventually stopped visiting. Greenland had few things worth the effort, one being Narwhal tusks, but in the 14th century tastes changed, and there were fewer reasons to visit apart from checking they were doing OK.

The point being, they were cut off. No major trees, mostly scrub, so they couldn't build any sort of boat, let alone ships, and not enough fuel to smelt iron ore (I'm not sure if there is any coal in Greenland, but it wasn't being used in that period anyway, or even if there is any iron ore, maybe bog iron would be it). So the iron they had became incredibly precious, so was used and reused until it was barely there. As a result I would be surprised if any finds were made apart from tiny scraps of "things" that might not even be recognisable any more.

[Shahril Dzulkifli]

The strange thing is not even a single Viking sword, axe, spear and mace can be found in Greenland today due to lack of evidence there and so too their settlements.