he native trees of Greenland are unsuitable for larger construction projects or shipbuilding. Instead, the Norse colonists (AD 985–1450) relied on driftwood and imported timber.
To study timber origins and distribution on Greenland, Lísabet Guðmundsdóttir from the University of Iceland examined the wood assemblages from five Norse sites in western Greenland, of which four were medium-sized farms and one a high-status episcopal manor.
All sites were occupied between AD 1000 and 1400 and dated by radiocarbon dating and associated artifact types.
A microscopic examination of the cellular structure of the wood previously found by archaeologists on these sites enabled the identification of tree genus or species.
The results show that just 0.27% of the wood examined were unambiguous imports, including oak, beech, hemlock, and Jack pine. Another 25% of the total wood studied could be either imported or driftwood, including larch, spruce, Scots pine and fir.
Because hemlock and Jack pine were not present in Northern Europe during the early second millennium AD, the pieces identified from the medieval contexts in Greenland must have come from North America.
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