A ship carried letters, religious news, political developments and knowledge about prices and conditions elsewhere.

It also carried people who could marry into families abroad or return with new skills.

Isolation therefore affects culture as well as material life.

A community can become increasingly different from its homeland simply because fewer people and ideas move through it.

The question of emigration is especially difficult because movement can erase archaeological identity.

If a Greenlander boarded a ship and settled in Iceland, the person might quickly become archaeologically indistinguishable from other Icelanders.

If a family joined another community, their Scandinavian ancestry might survive genetically while their Greenlandic material culture disappeared.