Norse and Aztecs · EPILOGUE ·
Norse and Aztecs compared
Chapter 12 of Climate and Innovation: The Norse and the Aztecs, c. 790–1521: “Two Answers to the Environment”
The Norse met a cold, scattered environment with mobility: ships, seasonal hunting, trade and assemblies. The Mexica met a rich but closed lake basin with concentration: dikes, aqueducts, raised fields and a tribute empire feeding perhaps 200,000 people. Norse Greenland, of perhaps 2,000–2,500 people, had no reserves.
Chapter 12 is part of membership. WW2 is free — every chapter. Try chapters 1–2 of any 2 other atlases (3 with a free account). Opening a new atlas uses one of them. Membership opens all 21 — Join.
Free printable Norse and Aztecs study guide, sent by email ↓
The map above is the world of The Norse North Atlantic, 1500 — Inuit Greenland; Orkney and Shetland to Scotland.
Part of IB History: The Norse and the Aztecs →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The question this atlas began with was how societies innovated to live with, and to profit from, a demanding climate, and why some of their innovations lasted while others failed; the two cases answer it in opposite ways. The Norse, the Scandinavian seafarers of the Viking Age, met a cold and scattered environment with mobility: ships, seasonal hunting, long-distance trade and assemblies that held small communities together. The Mexica, the people often called the Aztecs, met a rich but closed lake basin with concentration: dikes, aqueducts, raised fields and a tribute empire that fed a city of perhaps 200,000 people on islands. The Norse system was flexible in its ships and institutions but rigid where it mattered most in Greenland, a colony of perhaps 2,000–2,500 people farming cattle at the margin and paying its way with one export. When climate, trade and isolation turned together, its people left.
The Mexica system was resilient against frost, drought and flood, because it drew food from the lake, the market and the empire at once, but its concentration made it vulnerable to an enemy who could cut its water and blockade its lake, and to a disease no one could foresee. Both stories end with other peoples in possession: in Greenland the Inuit, who had arrived two centuries earlier with boats and harpoons suited to the sea ice, and in Mexico Spanish colonists, who later drained the lake. On the map of about 1500, Greenland is Inuit country, the Norse farms stand empty, and John Cabot’s voyage of 1497 reaches what was probably Newfoundland. What lasted were techniques that ordinary communities could keep using for many purposes whatever happened to the state above them: the clinker ship of overlapping planks, stockfish, Iceland’s assembly and the chinampa, the raised field in the lake.
The full story
The inquiry question, how societies innovate to live with a demanding climate, shows that climate mattered in both cases, but in different ways. For the Norse, climate set the stage, since the warmth of about 950–1250 made Greenland’s fjords farmable and the cooling and drying after about 1275–1300 narrowed the margin again. For the Mexica, climate brought sudden shocks inside a stable pattern: the floods of 1449 and 1499, the frosts and drought of 1450–54 confirmed by tree rings, and a long drought from 1514 to 1539 that overlapped the conquest. The Norse met slow change with gradual adaptation, eating seals and shifting trade, until leaving made more sense. The Mexica met sudden shocks with engineering, storage and conquest of warmer lands. Each society answered the climate it actually faced.
The difference in scale explains much of the difference in outcome. Norse Greenland held perhaps 2,000–2,500 people, about as many people as one of Tenochtitlan’s seventy neighbourhoods, while the Basin of Mexico held perhaps 1–1.5 million. Small numbers made the Norse colony easy to found and impossible to defend against compounding pressures, since every lost ship, failed hay harvest or slump in ivory prices hit a society with no reserves. Large numbers let the Mexica build dikes and chinampas, raised fields built up from the lake bed like garden beds standing in water, and absorb a famine, but they also tied the city to tribute that made enemies and to structures that a besieger could cut. The cost chart below shows the scale of each society. The Norse failed through smallness and the Mexica fell through concentration, which are opposite versions of the same weakness, a lack of spread risk.
The legacies of the two cases show which kinds of innovation lasted and which did not. In Greenland the Inuit, whose boats, harpoons and lamps suited the sea ice, became the island’s people, and the Norse ruins at Hvalsey and elsewhere are now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Iceland survived with its law and literature. In Mexico the Spaniards kept the city and abandoned the Mexica way of living with the lake, digging a drainage tunnel at Huehuetoca in 1607–08. In 1629, with the tunnel closed for repairs, heavy rains left the city under water for about five years, and the response was to drain ever more of the lake for three centuries. Today parts of Mexico City, built on dried lake clay, sink by up to about 50 centimetres a year, while the chinampas of Xochimilco are still farmed. Innovations survived when they worked with the environment’s variety, and failed when they bet everything on a single resource or a single place.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Comparing two very different societies
Comparing Norse Greenland with the Mexica raises real methodological problems, and acknowledging them strengthens the argument. The two societies differed in scale by a factor of several hundred, in political form, in technology and in the kind of evidence that survives, since the Norse are known from sagas, annals and excavated farms and the Mexica from codices, post-conquest chronicles and the archaeology of a buried city. Their climates differed too, with slow cooling in the North Atlantic and sudden shocks in a tropical highland basin. Historians who compare such cases do so to test general claims, here the claim that innovations last when they spread risk, and they look for patterns that hold despite the differences. The comparison is persuasive where both cases point the same way, for example in the long survival of flexible techniques such as the clinker ship and the chinampa, and weaker where the differences in scale and evidence are too large to control. Comparison here is a tool for testing an argument, and it works best when its limits are stated.
From managing the lake to draining it
The colonial fate of the Basin of Mexico is the clearest example in this atlas of an innovation abandoned and replaced, and its consequences continue today. Vera Candiani’s history of the drainage shows that Spanish authorities, facing floods in a city they had rebuilt on Tenochtitlan’s ruins, chose to empty the lakes, abandoning the dikes and canals that the Mexica had maintained for a century. Enrico Martínez’s tunnel at Huehuetoca, built with huge forced Indigenous labour in 1607–08, soon collapsed in places, and when rains began on 21 September 1629 the city stayed largely under water until 1634. Drainage works continued into the twentieth century. Estelle Chaussard and colleagues showed in 2021 that pumping groundwater from beneath the old lake bed has compacted its soft, compressible clay, so parts of the city sink by up to about 50 centimetres a year, fastest where the clay is thickest, and the compaction cannot be reversed. A lake once managed for food and defence has become a hazard beneath one of the world’s largest cities, home to more than twenty million people.
What the two cases can and cannot teach about climate change
The Norse and the Mexica are often cited in modern debates about climate change, and historians caution against drawing simple lessons. Jared Diamond used Norse Greenland as a warning about societies that refuse to adapt, while Andrew Dugmore and Thomas McGovern argue that the Norse adapted well and fell to a conjuncture of pressures that no single choice could have avoided. The Mexica are cited as masters of sustainable water management, yet their system rested on tribute and forced labour and failed catastrophically under siege and epidemic. What the cases do suggest, with the support of the evidence in this atlas, is that vulnerability depends on scale, diversity and connection as much as on the severity of a climatic shock. Small societies dependent on one resource and large societies concentrated in one place are both exposed, in different ways. The most robust innovations spread risk across many resources, many places and many people, and they can be changed when the conditions they were built for change.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
Different environments demanded different answers. The North Atlantic offered scattered pockets of grass and rich seas separated by dangerous water, which rewarded mobility, ships and trade. The Basin of Mexico offered a concentrated, fertile lake system in a closed valley, which rewarded engineering and the organisation of labour. Each society’s innovations fitted the opportunities its environment offered, which is why their systems look so different despite facing the same underlying problem of a demanding climate.
Scale shaped resilience. The Norse colony in Greenland held a few thousand people at most, while the Basin of Mexico held more than a million, a difference of several hundred times. Scale decided how much labour could be mobilised, how much food could be stored and how many losses could be absorbed. It explains why the Mexica could build dikes and survive famine and why the Norse colony had so little margin when its pressures combined.
Single points of failure decided both endings. Norse Greenland depended on one export, walrus ivory, and one link to Europe, the ships from Bergen, so their decline left the colony with no fallback. Tenochtitlan depended on causeways, an aqueduct and canoe supply across one lake, which a besieger could cut. In both cases the end came where the system concentrated its dependence, which is the strongest common lesson of the comparison and the hardest to see while a system is succeeding.
Other peoples with different systems replaced both. In Greenland the Thule Inuit, with technology built for sea ice, expanded as the Norse withdrew, and in Mexico Spanish colonists, with their own diseases, livestock and engineering, replaced the Mexica state. In both cases a different system took over the same environment, one adapting to it and one attempting to remake it, which shows that an environment sets the price of each way of life and leaves the choice to the people living in it.
THE TURNING POINT
Hvalsey and Tenochtitlan: two kinds of ending. The silent ruin of Hvalsey church and the drained lake beneath Mexico City are the two endpoints of this atlas, and placing them side by side is the hinge of the comparison. Norse Greenland ended in a quiet withdrawal, with a church left standing and farms abandoned in order, because a small society concluded that the costs of staying outweighed the gains. Tenochtitlan ended in a siege, and its lake system was then dismantled by new rulers with other priorities. One system faded through smallness and distance; the other was broken through its concentration and remade by conquerors.
What it changed
Greenland becomes an Inuit land, then a Danish colony. Inuit communities spread along Greenland’s west and south coasts by about 1500. Danish colonisation began in the eighteenth century and shaped the island for two hundred years. Greenland’s colonial status ended in 1953, Home Rule followed in 1979 and Self-Government in 2009. The Norse ruins became a focus of national and scholarly memory, and in 2017 the farming landscape of Kujataa, including Hvalsey, joined the World Heritage list.
The lake becomes a sinking city. Mexico City grew on the bed of the drained lake into one of the world’s largest cities, and it still faces both flooding and subsidence, sinking by up to about 50 centimetres a year where the compressible lake clay is thickest, as groundwater is pumped from beneath it. The Mexica problem of living with water in a closed basin remains the city’s central environmental challenge five centuries later.
A question for the present. The inquiry this atlas has followed, how societies innovate to live with a demanding climate and why some innovations last, has become a question for every society facing climate change. The two cases suggest that lasting adaptation depends on spreading risk across resources, places and people, and on institutions able to change as conditions change, which is a historical argument that students can test against the sources in this atlas.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Which society’s response to its environment was more successful, and by what standard should success be judged?
The answer depends on the standard chosen, and stating that standard explicitly is the key to a strong answer. Judged by scale and achievement, the Mexica were far more successful, since their dikes, aqueducts, chinampas and tribute fed a city of perhaps 200,000 and survived famine and flood, while Norse Greenland never exceeded a few thousand people and was abandoned. Judged by longevity, Norse Greenland lasted about 450 years, longer than the Mexica empire’s century of dominance after 1428, and Iceland endures today. Judged by the survival of innovations, both left lasting techniques, the clinker ship, the stockfish trade and the Althing from the Norse, and the chinampas from the Mexica. Neither society was undone by climate alone, since the Norse faced compounding economic pressures and the Mexica a coalition of enemies and an epidemic. The transferable insight is that success in adapting to the environment must be measured over time and against all the shocks a society faces, human as well as natural.
An interesting fact
Europeans rediscovered Greenland while looking for people who were no longer there. In 1721 the Norwegian priest Hans Egede sailed from Bergen to Greenland, hoping to find descendants of the medieval Norse settlers and bring them into the Lutheran church, since nobody in Scandinavia knew whether they had survived. He found only Inuit, learned their language and stayed to work among them. His first mission stood on a small island, and in 1728 the colony moved to the mainland under the governor Claus Paarss as Godthåb, today’s Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. A mission to the vanished Norse became the beginning of Danish rule over the Inuit who had replaced them.
Related
THE FREE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
Join the Dispatch — a short welcome series, then a letter when a new atlas opens — and the printable study guide for Climate and Innovation is yours now, free.
NO TRACKING · YOUR ADDRESS IS USED FOR THE DISPATCH AND NOTHING ELSE · UNSUBSCRIBE ANYTIME