The life of the inhabitants of the eastern coast of the Baltic sea was hugely dependent on agriculture. It was the amount of crops yielded from fields that decided on the standard of life, nutrition, life or starvation of people.
Various archaeologists and scientists tried to estimate how many people lived on the present-day territory of Estonia in the second half of the first millennium.
Some scholars, assuming a slow but constant growth in population size, suggest that the population of Estonia in AD 500 was about 23,000, grew to about 95,000 in AD 900 and reached 150,000 in the beginning of the 13th century.
Settlements in the Viking age in Estonia
Source: A, Tvauri, The Migration Age, Pre-Viking Age and Viking Age in Estonia, 2012, p. 23.
Others argued that we cannot assume constant growth - there is evidence which suggests that several times, for example in the 6th century when a climatic catastrophe resulted in limited hours of sunlight and consequently poor crops and extensive famine, the number of people all over Northern Europe dropped abruptly. Other population losses can be observed around the Baltic Sea and in north-western Rus in the 860s and the 940s–950s, though they were not as extensive as in the mid-6th century. The tendency was visible in vast areas which led scholars to assume it was caused by food shortages (and climate anomaly in the case of the 6th century) rather than any abrupt military aggression or rapid political change.
Archaeological record (burial grounds, settlements, forts etc.) shows that in the vicinity of Tallinn and Harjumaa (north Estonia) the growth in population and its impact on natural environment became evident again in the second half of the Viking age (late 10th through 11th century).
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