As it happens I have posted several times recently about the possible causes of the decline of European settlement in medieval Greenland. There are links to those posts in the most recent one, Yet more on the fate of Medieval Greenland
I also posted about the trading world of the Handeatic League which ultimately linked that far north western frontier, looking as it did to Norway, to the wider Scandinavian world and thence to the eastern Atlantic, the Baltic and their hinterlands and ultimately to the river systems of what emerged as Russia, and thence, in theory and practice, to Constantinople. These links can be accessed at A Hanseatic Cog in Tallinn
With this still in mind and with our current acute awareness of the Ukraine I was particularly struck by coming upon and reading a report showing that in the middle ages Greenland walrus ivory was traded to Kyiv and worked there to form luxury products. This, inter alia, suggests another possible reason for the decline of the Greenland colony in the possible excessive hunting of the walrus for its valuable tusks and evidence for those of females and youngsters being taken. Fewer quality tusks meant less trade.
The length of these trading links is impressive and leads the mind to reflect on what else was transmitted along these extended routes in terms of ideas and images.
The article, from Science.org, can be read at Vikings shipped walrus ivory from Greenland to Kyiv, ancient skulls show
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