Recent archaeology has introduced a new people into the scenario of 13th-century Greenland – the Dorset people of the Paleo-Eskimo tradition. These people were encountered by Norse hunters who travelled northwards on their hunting forays, as described in Historia Norvegiae, which recounts contact with the so-called Skrælíngja. The question of who these Skrælíngja were has been discussed since the discovery of the source in the late 19th century. It has been proposed that they were the Inuit of the Thule culture. We now know that three different cultures—Paleo-Eskimo, Inuit, and Europeans—impacted on the development of Greenland's history in the first half of the second millennium AD. This paper addresses issues of interactions between them.
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1 July 2008
The Nature of Contact between Native Greenlanders and Norse
Hans Christian Gulløv
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Journal of the North Atlantic
Vol. 1 • No. 1
July 2008
Vol. 1 • No. 1
July 2008