Walrus tusks were Viking age gold

Historians have floated a half-dozen theories for why Viking Greenland settlements suddenly vanished in the 1300s and 1400s, after 500 years of occupation. Was it climate change, the Black Death, even bad farming habits imported from Scandinavia?

But what if…it all came down to walrus ivory?

It turns out that walrus tusks during the Viking and Middle Ages fuelled a long-distance trade network that stretched from Inuit hunters far above the Arctic Circle to churches and royalty in cities as far flung as Novgorod, Kyiv and Köln. Now, using ancient DNA and isotope analysis, archaeologists have shown that virtually all these tusks came from Greenland!

And then suddenly, the market collapsed. What happened?

Today's show looks at how everything from cutting edge technology to dogged footwork has allowed researchers to piece together the details of the global walrus trade a thousand years and more back in time. But they're also using this window into the past to better understand walruses themselves, and make predictions about the future of walruses in a warming world.

My guests on today's show are James Barrett, a professor of medieval and environmental archaeology at the NTNU University Museum, and Katrien Dierickx and Erin Kunisch, both postdocs working with James and with the 4-Oceans project.

Here's a link to the NTNU University Museum's new exhibition on the walrus tusk trade, called Sea Ivories. The exhibition includes the amazing Wingfield-Digby Crozier, on loan from the Victoria & Albert Museum, plus several Lewis Chessmen, on loan from the British Museum.

Here's a link to photos and a description of a classic Romanesque carving in walrus ivory, the Cloisters Cross. Here's a link to a Gothic-style carving of elephant ivory.

Here are some of the academic articles related to our discussion today:

Barrett, James; Boessenkool, Sanne; Kneale, Catherine; O'Connell, Tamsin C; Star, Bastiaan. (2020) Ecological globalisation, serial depletion and the medieval trade of walrus rostra. Quaternary Science Reviews

Barrett, James; Khamaiko, Natalia; Ferrari, Giada; Cuevas, Angelica; Kneale, Catherine; Hufthammer, Anne Karin. (2022) Walruses on the Dnieper: new evidence for the intercontinental trade of Greenlandic ivory in the Middle Ages. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences

Keighley, X et al.Disappearance of Icelandic Walruses Coincided with Norse Settlement, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 36:12, Dec.2019, p2656–2667, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msz196

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