Greenland: Approaches to Historical Norse Archaeology

Introduction

The prehistory of Greenland is the story of successive migrations of Arctic hunters entering Greenland from what is now Canada. According to the archaeological record, the first humans to set foot on Greenland were the Independence I Culture who spread from High Arctic Canada into North Greenland about 4,500 years ago. During the next 3,000 years, people of the Saqqaq, Independence II, and Dorset cultures followed (Gulløv 2004). The first people to introduce a “writing” culture, however, were Norse colonists, who emigrated from Iceland to the southern subarctic parts of the Greenland west coast around CE 980. Unfortunately, we do not have written accounts from the Norse Greenlanders themselves; most information concerning events in Greenland was written down in either Iceland or Norway. About 100 years after the Norse had become established in South Greenland, a new group of Arctic hunters, the Thule Inuit, arrived in North Greenland from Canada. These were the first...