Cold Earth is a novel about an archaeological expedition to the west coast of Greenland, which takes place during a world-wide flu epidemic. Following in the tradition of Neville Shute's On the Beach, and We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ, Cold Earth focuses on the personal histories and interpersonal relationships of people under extreme conditions of isolation and (possibly) impending doom.
Cold Earth is told through the narrative and sequential journal entries of the six members of the field crew, led by Yianni, a thoroughly professional archaeologist right down to his concern with safety, budgets and an obsession with the Grand Purpose of the expedition.
Cold Earth and the Eastern Settlement
A key player in the story is the site itself, an abandoned farmstead in the Eastern Settlement, where Viking settlers (more precisely Norsemen) lived for some three hundred years. Increasingly bad weather, their own refusal to adapt to conditions, and the black death in Europe spelled an end to the colony, and in AD 1450, a Norwegian ship visiting Greenland's settlers found only abandoned farmsteads.
Much of the expedition's story is told by Nina, the only non-archaeologist. Nina is a literature scholar, studying the way Victorian England created the idea of the Norse. Throughout her narrative, Nina describes being visited by vengeful ghosts (Norse? Inuit?). Maybe we're seeing the loss of her sanity: Nina and the others are caught in their own interpretations of what happened on the coast of Greenland, because, like the failed Norse, the crew is cut off from the rest of the world, and increasingly uncertain when, or if, the helicopter will return to take them off Greenland before killing winter arrives.
Cold Earth: Bottom Line
The book touches on many issues near and dear to archaeological hearts: too tight budgets, the all-too-familiar personal clashes between strangers forced to live in close proximity, and what it takes to trade site preservation for human preservation.
But more than that, Cold Earth is a playing out of the Greenland saga--Yianni's crew is even visited by the modern equivalent of skraelings at one point, and it makes you recognize (but not necessarily approve of) why the crew didn't ask for help.
Cold Earth is a tense, engrossing story about six more or less strangers who eventually are forced to deal with the difficulties presented by a harsh climate and their own inadequacies. What I would like to have read, but isn't here, is the story of how the six learned (or didn't learn--no spoilers here) to cope with winter: but then, we don't really know how the Norse did that either.
