Inhospitable Regions and Marginality: Settlement at the End of the World

Environmental, economic, social and political marginality is a condition that presupposes a preceding development from balance to imbalance. The analysis of the development of the Norse society in Greenland suggests that marginality as applied to human settlement is not only a matter of the environmental qualities of an area. Cultural and socio-economic factors, internal and external, play an important role for the understanding of the imbalance that arises in a society. The marginalization process must be assessed in a historical perspective, and in order to understand this process we must include in our deliberations the environmental factors and the developments in cultural contacts and long-distance trade.