Prehistoric Greenland

What can a frozen island reveal about the people who thrived there for thousands of years? Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Asta Mønsted to explore prehistoric Greenland through astonishing archaeology and living mythology, from permafrost-preserved homes, tools, and clothing to whale hunts, shamanic stories, and the world of the Thule Inuit. Along the way, they uncover how families survived the Arctic, honoured spirits, and built a rich culture in one of Earth’s harshest places. MORE Ice Age America Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/ice-age-america/id1520403988?i=1000677472289 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4KZruCMwpO7TakuiMs7DMp Origins of the Inuit Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/origins-of-the-inuit/id1520403988?i=1000674021700 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/47CqFOJgHT8YfZXIjenwyk Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Hannah Feodorov. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, plus early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. Hello and welcome to this special episode of The Ancients. Now, as I'm sure you're aware, Greenland is and has been in the news quite a lot recently.

• 0:42Tristan Hughes?

  Now, on The Ancients, we don't cover events of the modern day, but what we can do is shine a light on the incredible histories, pre-histories of these areas of the world. And Greenland is a fantastic example of that. We want to promote the archaeology, the prehistory, of this massive island in the north of the world. A prehistory that stretches back thousands of years. A rich tale of archaeology, but also mythology. What I loved about this chat is the wealth of archaeology that survives because of the cold conditions. Think of the snow and the cold conditions acting like a natural freezer.

• 1:27Tristan Hughes?

  So, so many organic materials survive. And then combining that with mythology to learn more about how these people lived and how they viewed the polar world around them. Our guest for this episode is Dr. Esther Munster. She is an archaeologist from Greenland. She also specializes in the mythology as well. She was so wonderful to talk to, so warm and lovely, and really shines a light on the people of Greenland and their long, long history. I really do hope you enjoy. Let's go.

• 2:11Tristan Hughes?

  It's eight hundred years ago. High up in the Arctic, a fire burns brightly, nurtured within a building made of stone and bone. Animal skins insulate the interior. The house is well-built for the cold climate. The fire's heat does not escape. This winter house is home to several families. Their wet outdoor clothes drying on racks above. Now they come together around the fireplace to eat and tell stories. Children run around, as they do, until they're finally told to sit and take their place. The storytelling is about to begin.

• 2:54Tristan Hughes?

  Forward steps the shaman, a leading figure in their small community and the deliverer of tonight's tale. What was it to be tonight? Perhaps the story of the heroic hunter who slew the great whale many moons ago that still provides food for this community? Or perhaps a myth steeped in survival knowledge, lessons for the young to take heed of in this snowy landscape? Or maybe a story about the spirits that lived in the world around them, in the beaches, atop the mountains, even in their own houses? Or maybe, just maybe, the shaman will talk about the majestic beast that crosses land and sea, covered in white fur,

• 3:39Tristan Hughes?

  able to stand on two legs, protective of its young, with razor-sharp teeth and claws that could easily end the life of a human? The dangerous, yet fascinating bear that calls this polar world its domain? The children hoped for an exciting story, but tonight, their luck is out. As the shaman begins, it's soon clear that tonight's tale is not one of their favourites. Slowly, their eyes begin to close. Soon, they are fast asleep. Perhaps tomorrow, the shaman will treat them with a more thrilling tale of valiant heroes. Perhaps.

• 4:21Tristan Hughes?

  Welcome to The Ancients and our brand new episode about prehistoric Greenland, about the people who have called this great Arctic island their home for centuries, who learnt to thrive in this cold climate and about whom we know a remarkable amount. This is a story of incredible archaeology, of prehistoric settlements preserved along the coastlines of Greenland, of organic materials, clothing, food, human remains, that have survived in the permafrost. But this is also a story about mythology, tales passed down for centuries that reveal more about what these communities believed in.

• 5:01Tristan Hughes?

  Together, these fields help tell the fascinating story of Greenland's prehistoric populations, how they lived and how they viewed the Arctic world around them. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of prehistoric Greenland. Our guest is Dr Asta Munster, visiting researcher at the University of Copenhagen. Asta, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 5:31Tristan Hughes?

  You're more than welcome. And to explore the prehistoric story of Greenland, I mean, Asta, with everything that's going on in the world at the moment, it feels very important to highlight the long history the people of this land have, that does stretch back hundreds and hundreds of years into prehistoric times.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yes, it does.

• 5:49Tristan Hughes?

  And do we have a lot of archaeology surviving, which has been pieced together by archaeologists like yourselves over the years to learn more about these people and how they lived?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I actually first want to go a little bit back to what you said just before, why it's important to understand that there is a long history, because I think Greenland has often been sort of talked about today as if it was empty, or if it was remote, or just newly discovered, right? But in reality, it has been inhabited for thousands of years, hundreds of years, by people with...

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Deep knowledge of the land, the ice, the animals, and also the climates. So, understanding that long history helps sort of counter the idea that Greenland is just a strategic space or a research frontier. It is a homeland for people and they know that land and they know it with their memory and they have a deep culture of that space. And yes, to answer your first real question, surprisingly, actually, we do have a lot of archaeological remains to uncover in Greenland.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  We have many sites along the coast. So if you look up Greenland on a map, you will see a big ice sheet in the middle. And of course, people don't, people have never lived there until we go back to the dinosaurs. But people have always lived along the coast of Greenland and all the archaeological sites that we have are along the coast of all of Greenland, actually. And the archaeological remains that we have, we find settlements with house remains, dwellings. We find caches, so people's sort of freezers in the landscape, cairns. Cairns, burial mounds. Cairns, yeah, I always pronounce it wrong, sorry.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  And then all of this has mainly been preserved because of permafrost, preserving many items that would usually decay. So we have many organic materials such as wooden pieces, for example. You don't find a lot of wood, but what we have might sometimes have been preserved. We have bone pieces, sometimes baleen, tusks, antler, sometimes even fur and hair can be preserved in those icy frozen layers. So excavating and archaeological...

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Ecological site can be really interesting and really intriguing because it is sort of this freezer that have just frozen things in time. And then, of course, also in layers, so we can see this is not only one incidence, but also there is a deep history at various sites, for example. And then, of course, we also have stone tools, but the more exotic stuff, as organic materials, we also find that.

• 9:10Tristan Hughes?

  No, but I mean, that is the incredible fact, isn't it? And you can look at other places that are very cold, whether it's in the Altai Mountains or high up in the Alps, where, you know, they do get those rare discoveries of organic material preserved in, as you say, these natural freezers. To think that there is so much of that surviving in Greenland, that you have this invaluable record to learn more about how these people lived all along the coastline, as you say, all around Greenland, so not just like the southern tip, you know, further north as well. That's amazing.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, and I forgot textiles. I mean, oftentimes we had skin clothing, but we also find fragments of textiles from the Norsemen, for example.

• 9:53Tristan Hughes?

  You also mentioned in passing, one of the things that survives is baleen. Now, is that whale blubber? Is that what they should be?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  No, it's the whale with this sifting, it's not their teeth, so it's called baleen. Yeah, so, and I've forgotten the name of that specific whale right now.

• 10:13Tristan Hughes?

  Is it the bowhead? Is it the bowhead whale?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  It's the bowhead, yes, exactly. It's the bowhead whale, and it has this sort of sifting system in its mouth, so it swallows up a lot of water and then all the food is sort of sifted and stay inside the mouth while all the water is being sifted out.

• 10:34Tristan Hughes?

  Ah, okay.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  And baleen could be used for, because they come in these sort of strings and you can sort of pull them apart and then you can make fishing lines that goes hundreds and hundreds of meters into the sea ice. But you can also carve it out. The hard bit can also be carved.

• 10:58Tristan Hughes?

  I've got to ask for that straight away. So have there been, have they, have people like yourself, have you discovered prehistoric fishing lines made out of baleen that went hundreds of metres into the, into the sea?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Not me, but some of my colleagues have and it's, you can see it exhibited at the National Museum of Denmark. And it, it looks amazing. It does. But I have been with modern lines. I have been ice fishing with my father in Greenland. So sort of going in their steps.

• 11:31Tristan Hughes?

  And Asta, we were talking about this just before we, we began recording. Whereabouts in Greenland do you come from? Because it's not, once again, it's not the southern tip. It is quite high up in the, well, in the scheme of things in Greenland.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  It is, it is. It is called Ummannna and there are several places in Greenland called Ummannna. Because oftentimes you named places after what they look like. So you can recognise it in the landscape. Or you could, it could, the name could implement what function? Like, is it a natural harbour or something like that? This is where we hide our meat. Or this is our hunting grounds for hunting reindeer. So the place name could often hint of those, of those functions, but also of what they look like. And Ummannna means hard-like or hard-shaped-like because of that mountain that you saw earlier.

• 12:28Tristan Hughes?

  As a mountain which overlooks that, the settlement.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  And it's sort of this, exactly.

• 12:34Tristan Hughes?

  I had a look on Google Maps of Ummannac and I noticed that they also had a football pitch as well. And like a football team, which is like, just amazing, even though it is absolutely striking. But back to the story of prehistoric Greenland. So it sounds like you have this rich array of archaeology to learn more about these people. But Asta, tell us also about mythology. How important a source can mythology be also for learning more about these people?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  It is a rich, rich source that we cannot overlook. Um, mythology would be, and in, in many, many cultures, right, uh, across the globe. But mythology would explain how the world sort of worked. And also how humans should behave within it, uh, according to the social norms agreed upon. Um, so sort of spirits, animals and also the weather. And people were deeply interconnected in these stories. And it was explained sort of how humans can fit into this world, but they are not the rulers of this world.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  So it doesn't have this anthropocentric idea that humans, they can just do whatever they want. No, humans are just a part of that chain. Uh, and so, and it goes to show even today, for example. Um, so when you have killed your first seal as a young hunter. It was believed that it is the same seal that you will hunt for the rest of your life. If you treat that seal with respect and if you treat it well. So you need to, um, serve it some fresh water because just as any other creature, it is thirsty.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Just like when you get guests over, you ask them, do you want something to drink, right? But you do that with the hunting game as well. And you show that respect to the animal and then it will sort of be reincarnated. And you are gonna hunt that seal for the rest of your life. And that's gonna create a sort of relationship between you and the hunting game. Um, so there was this belief that animals were not killed because of your, your skills only.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  You needed to train on your skills, but you also needed to treat the animals and the the rest of nature with respect. So when you would go out hunting for whale, for example, the whale was quite picky in a way, or you know, it likes fine things, the whale. So you need to put on your best suit, or if you can, a newly, a new set of clothing when you go hunting for it, to pay its respect for that hunting animal and to attract the animal to you. So there is something about you, what you put into the world is going to come back to you, right?

• 15:48Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah. How much of this mythology, how many stories like that have survived to the present day that have their origins back in prehistoric times? Is it quite a rich library of information?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  In a way, it really is, it really is. We have stories, I mean, because there are stories that were handed over from generation to generation, they could be hundreds of years old. And within archaeology, we like to date things, but it is difficult to date stories, right? Especially when they needed to be handed over for decades and decades and never be changed, for example. But in, when the colonizers came, then, the missionaries in seventeen twenty-one, they started to write down or make some notes on some of these stories they, that they had

• 16:44Speaker 01

  heard from the local people. And we, today, when we look at those sources, we need to sort of peel, peel it just like an onion, because they write down, I have heard this ridiculous story told by the locals, of course. So we need to, to take away the layers to find out what did the locals actually tell them from that time. So already from seventeen thirty-five, we have stories being written down about what the locals were telling each other and what they believed. And then we have All the way up until nineteen eighty-one, those stories were recorded.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  So today we have a database containing two thousand two hundred and eighty stories that were all collected over that time span of two hundred and fifty years. And of course, the question for us is, is there anything missing? And there probably is, because there is also something about, might there be stories that you tell the outsiders that come and ask you? If the priests come and ask you, hey, what stories do you believe in, right? Do you give it all away? Or do you hold some of the stories back? And that is, that is difficult for us to answer, of course.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  But even if some of the stories have been held back, it is still a rich source for us today. Because what we can do as archaeologists is sort of consult, but even do more than just consulting these oral stories. We can also see how archaeology can be challenged by those stories. So what I tried to do in my PhD thesis, for example, was to learn from the oral history and take it, take the stories as seriously as possible. And what I learned was, when we go to a site, we see a beach, we observe the beach,

• 18:55Speaker 01

  and we often think of it as the natural harbor. That is the entryway from the sea or the sea ice in the wintertime to a settlement, either by boat or kayak or by your dog sledge. What I didn't know, but what I figured out or what I learned from the oral stories was that the beach could also be an ally. So if there was a murderous person out there who wanted to harm you or someone who had sent a tubilak, so an evil spirit to, to harm you, you could go down to that beach right in front of your settlement.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  And pour out some blood or some urine, you could recite a spell to protect yourself. And then when that dupleg would arrive to the beach, the beach would rise up and become large stones and rocks that would crush that hurtful creature, right? And it's not for me to say, no, that never happened, because it tells me a lot about the way of thinking about the world that I cannot excavate, but I know it through the sources of the old stories.

• 20:16Tristan Hughes?

  And I guess it's one of those wonderful things, you mentioned earlier, like the importance of spirits in the natural world in the mythology, that then when you go, as I'm sure we'll delve into some examples as we go along, you go to a particular archaeological site, maybe a house, you find certain objects within a house, which maybe if you didn't know the mythological context, you know, would look rather strange, but maybe certain objects, if you know the mythology stories, might explain why you find them in a house for some reason or another, you know. It may give more context into, as you say, what they believe, which gives so much more value to the things that you're finding.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Certainly, but we also need to remember that in the Greenland big context, we sometimes see everyday objects being used for ritual activities. So of course, when we excavate, let's say we excavate a house, we find a fork or a knife lying on the ground.

• 21:20Tristan Hughes?

  Classic, yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  And you think, oh, this is just for cooking, you know. And we cannot really say, was it also used for ritual activity? And we cannot take a sample from that knife. It's not going to tell us, but it just gives a different or a new way of interpreting some of these objects that we encounter.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened in human history. From the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost, and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:40Tristan Hughes?

  Let's go through some key themes in the archaeology now. First off, I must ask about arrival dates, roughly, when we know about when people first reach Greenland. So, I mean, Asta, how far back can we go? When do people first reach Greenland that we know of from archaeology?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Well, Greenland is more or less one of the last places on earth to be inhabited by humans. So the first people reaching Greenland, that happened 4,500 years ago.

• 23:14Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's not that long a history compared to other parts of this earth, but that is the long history we have here in Greenland.

• 23:24Tristan Hughes?

  And do we know how they reached Greenland? Presumably it's from the West, it's from North America?

• 23:30Speaker 01

  It's from Canada. Yeah, so the first people entering Greenland, they came all the way from Alaska or southeast Siberia, across Alaska, and then crossed Canada and into Greenland.

• 23:46Tristan Hughes?

  Do we know much about these people? I mean, I have my, is it like the Dorset culture that it's called, or do they have much that survives?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  The oldest culture... Is archaeologically called the Saqar culture. And then we have the Dorset culture, which is sort of in between. And then we have what is archaeologically called the Thulaculture, Thulaculture, also called the Inuit culture, which are the ancestors of modern day Greenlanders.

• 24:18Tristan Hughes?

  And do they follow directly after those ones you mentioned previously? Or like, are the earliest people who reached Greenland, are their migrations successful? Or is it, you know, the ancestors of indigenous Greenlanders today? Do they actually arrive a little later, the Thul, as you say?

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Thul, they arrive the latest. So the first waves, we don't see connections geologically between the different cultures. And when we excavate at the sort of gate into Greenland, which is considered to be northwest part of Greenland, where I think it's only forty kilometers to Canada. So you can walk that when there is ice. When we excavate in that area, we see remnants of even cultures or waves in between those three that I just mentioned, but they never really went any further than just into the

• 25:19Speaker 01

  land and then for whatever reason, they turned back into Canada.

• 25:23Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:24Tristan Hughes?

  And when did the Thul in Inuits arrive? And I guess then start being a bit bolder?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:29Tristan Hughes?

  And, you know, settling more and more of the coasts of Greenland?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, we see a difference from the Dorset culture and Thulaculture. The Dorset and also the Saqar, we don't find remains of sledges or them having dogs, for example, or kayaks. But we see that with the Thulaculture. We see remains of them having dog straps and sledges, and they also have kayaks and the big boat for multiple people, which is called the Umiaq.

• 26:06Tristan Hughes?

  The Umiaq, okay. And do we know much about the Umiaq and like how it functioned?

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Well, we we often see historic paintings or depictions of mainly women sitting inside those umiaks and then the men would be sitting in the small kayaks and the women would be rowing it with all their gear, like their skins for their tents and the kids and the dogs. So the women were really tough.

• 26:40Tristan Hughes?

  I can imagine, yes. And so is it naturally therefore that we have the earliest tool settlements? Are they from that northwestern part of Greenland where they first arrived?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they are. We see the first tool people arriving at that gate as we have seen before. And then they spread across the country. And some of the items that we see, for example, when you think about Greenlandic culture, many people think of the igloo, right?

• 27:13Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, I was going to ask about the igloo, yes.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  And an igloo that we understand it today as this sort of snow house. Of course, we cannot excavate igloos today because they melt, but we do find snow knives. And we find them from that gate in Greenland at the northwest part of Greenland, but we also find them all the way down to Disco Bay. So they have been using this snow knives and probably therefore also made igloos. But an igloo in itself actually comes from the Greenlandic word illu. And illu simply means house. So when we think about the turf

• 27:58Speaker 01

  houses and the stone houses that we see also later on, all the way up until 1930, some some places in Greenland, these turf and stone houses should actually also be called illus.

• 28:12Tristan Hughes?

  Right, well, I'm going to get straight on to houses now, but you mentioned Disco Bay in passing there, and I've just got it on my maps, and that looks like two thirds of the way down, or maybe three quarters of the way down there, so it's really far south of the original entry point. And I have in my notes here is one of those early settlements up that far northwest. Is it Ruin Island, which sounds an incredible name for a settlement for a place?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. Yeah, so at Ruin Island, we find some of the earliest remains from the Tula culture, the Inuit culture, and they date all the way back to 1150 AD. So that's some of the earliest sites that we have. And I think it's only six houses on that ruin, on that island, sorry. And then later on, we also see much larger sites. For example, when you go to Núllit, which is close to today's Pitufic Space Base,

• 29:14Speaker 01

  there we have a site with around, I think it's at least 30 houses and dwellings on that site. And that is because it's close to really good hunting grounds. So in Greenland, we have winter sites from the Tula culture, approximately about 2,500 sites.

• 29:41Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  On those sites that have been registered, sometimes we have one or two winter houses, but other times we have up to around 30 houses on one site. And then we also need to remember that a house could be reused. So when we excavate the houses, sometimes we find...

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Two or seven layers of people who had inhabited that house.

• 30:11Tristan Hughes?

  Amazing. Well, you mentioned winter houses there, so I feel it's time that we moved on to the housing of these prehistoric people. And yes, take it away, Asta, with these winter houses. I mean, what do we know about the structure of these houses? Because looking at them online, they look absolutely incredible.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  They do. They are amazing and well structured for the environment that they were built in. And the winter houses was only one type of house. And so in Greenland, because it's such a large area and also the seasons vary a lot. The winter house is only one dwelling. In the summertime, people would be staying in summer tents.

• 30:53Tristan Hughes?

  That makes sense.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  And that was much more mobile. And in between those two sort of extreme climates or seasons, you would say it's something that is called a kamma. So it is a construction that is a sort of hybrid between the summer tent and the winter house. So the winter house is built from the ground up, or actually it's dug around forty, fifty centimeters into the turf layer. And then you build your walls up from stones and turf that you cut in the area.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Then you have an entry tunnels, an entrance tunnel, and it's around, it can be one and a half meter all the way up to six meters. And the entrance tunnel is going to work as a sort of cold trap. So because it is dug into the ground, all that cold air is gonna stay in that entryway. And then you. Climb up, you uh crawl through that long entrance.

• 32:05Tristan Hughes?

  It's crawling, is it? It is crawling to get in, okay.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  It really is. You need to crawl and then you come up into the raised floor area. And from from that floor area, you can go to a raised uh sleeping platform. So because it is those layers, the cold trap re- works really well. And the warmest base inside the house is on the sleeping platform. Where the kids are running around uh probably naked. Um so it's really well structured for uh that extreme environment.

• 32:40Tristan Hughes?

  So it's really good of keep you keeping the cold out a- and the warmth in. And could they have made a fire in there or would it have smoked out the whole house? Or was it was it adept for having a fire as well?

• 32:52Speaker 01

  To begin with, for example, at the at Bruin Island. We see fires inside in a small uh sort of kitchen niche. And then at some point, they figure out, oh, this land that we have just moved to, wood is not abundant. So we need to figure out another way of doing things. So they start cutting into stone, soapstone, for example, and they make these soapstone lamps. And in the soapstone land, you can put some seal blubber, whale blubber, whatever blubber you have. And then you put some dried mosses that you sort of roll into small sausages along the side.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  And there you have a huge uh candle. And the this candle, so to say, is gonna give you some lights. But it also provides the house with much-needed uh warmth. So you can also cook above that lamp. So it's also your sort of cooking area. And then even raised over your cooking pot, you could have a drying rack. To dry your skins and your uh mittens and all of that from from being outside. So it was really well structured. And uh of course, um sometimes we see houses that.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Was meant for only one family. Um but we also see houses that could be for multiple families. So to begin with, they are often rounded. And then the houses could also be sort of clover shaped, depending on if you have two, three or four families staying under the same roof.

• 34:43Tristan Hughes?

  So almost little niches for each family kind of idea, right.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Exactly, because and then that niche is for your sleeping platform. And then when you imagine you have that coal trap and you have uh your lamp going on, but you also have people's body heat. And you could also insulate the walls with skins on the inside. So it could be really warm inside those uh winter houses.

• 35:11Tristan Hughes?

  And were these also uh very communal places as well? Could you imagine, you know, several of these families in one of those houses gathered around a fire, you know, retelling their myths, you know, what their beliefs are. So, you know, yeah, that part to the story as well.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Um hum. We, to begin with, we actually see a sort of um assembly house.

• 35:34Tristan Hughes?

  Ah, okay.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  People have their own houses um or maybe for two families. And then you have an assembly house where people can meet. It's called the Qasi. That's where you meet, you could dance, you could sing, you could tell your stories and entertain one another. You could laugh and probably also spook one another because that's also a way of connecting with people. And later on, we see, and now we're in the sixteen hundreds, the middle of the sixteen hundreds. We start seeing what we call communal houses. And they are more elongated and um sort of rectangular in shape.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  But you still have that entrance tunnel that you need to crawl through. And then you enter a space that it's more rectangular. And instead of having small niches for your families, they all have one long.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Sleeping platform and then you have sort of curtains dividing the different family compartments. So there you could then, uh, then you didn't have to go outside to the assembly house. You could just simply meet inside. Um, there to tell your stories, but, but the, the Angakop, the shaman of the settlement could also do his siangses right there.

• 36:59Tristan Hughes?

  I'd, I'd like to ask a bit more about shamans as we, as we go on, but it almost sounds a bit like a, dare I say, going too much into medieval territory here, but like a Viking longhouse or something similar to that.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:10Tristan Hughes?

  And so do we have, so it sounds like what you were saying earlier with, you know, you've got the summer houses as well and the igloos, but. To survive in the archaeology, to be seen today, to be recorded today, do we have more examples of the winter houses surviving because they are more. You know, they're more sturdy. They have survived the test of time better.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have survived better. I mean, we register summer tents as well, which, um. They only leave remains in the landscape as sort of rings of stone. But the winter houses, because you dug into the turf area and they are much sturdier. They need to be built to last a whole winter. And sometimes the winter house was probably even.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Not fortified, um, sort of made stronger. What would be the right word for that?

• 38:09Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, yes, no, yeah, protected, you know, they're, they're, yeah, they're, oh, i- in regards.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, or you, or you at least maintain, you maintain the house even if it has sort of fallen a bit down.

• 38:21Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, repaired. Okay, so you repair it.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  For example, uh, if a wall is almost sliding in, you of course, uh, need to, to repair it. But the idea in Greenland was also that, once you have built a house, there you're gonna stay during that winter. But once you leave the house, it's not yours. So whoever reaches that house in the next autumn to occupy it during that winter, it's their rights, it's everyone's rights. So you need to, um, to be there first. It's just because you helped to build it and you had sweat and tears and all of that,

• 39:03Speaker 01

  building that house, it, it, it doesn't matter, it's not yours. So we can also see where the good hunting grounds were, depending on how many times, uh, did families stay there.

• 39:18Tristan Hughes?

  Well, we'll go into hunting then after this, but I'd like to ask one more question on the, on the houses. In regards to mythology, surviving mythology, do we have archaeological evidence as well to show that these were places, you know, of spiritual and ritual belief? Was there a lot of mythology linked to the houses that they lived in?

• 39:37Speaker 01

  We see sort of traces, uh, linguistic traces connected to the house. So you have the, that entryway that I told you about, that could be really long, that is called, and the dohluk means throat. Uh, so the, the dohsok is the entrance tunnel as well itself, and the dohluk is throat on any animal. When you are inside the house, the winter house has an ishlup sotlua, and it means the house's nostrils. That is the ventilation, ventilation hall. Uh, so you get

• 40:18Speaker 01

  fresh air inside, especially when you're cooking inside. So the house also needs to breathe. And then you have, uh, the isikivik, isikivik means a view. And that of course is very close to isit with your eyes. And where do you see the view? You see that through your window. So the house also had eyes. And what is really interesting about this is that all of those three elements, so the throat, the nostrils and the eyes, they are all three placed on the front wall of the house.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  So you don't have eyes in the back of the house. Uh you have all of it in the front wall. So the house actually has a face. And that face was oftentimes facing the ocean. And the ocean in Greenlandic um worldview is oftentimes where you get the your food from. You get your food from marine animals. You can also hunt muskogs and and reindeer. But you oftentimes get food from the sea. And we also find it linguistically in how you would communicate where you would go.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  So if I asked you, where are you going uh for hunting? And you're gonna tell me, I'm gonna go west along the coast. And in order to understand that, I need to have that compass of yours as well. So I need to have my back against the inland ice. I need to have my nose and my eyes towards the sea. So when you tell me I'm gonna go west along the coast, if we are in West Greenland, that means you're going south. And if you are in East Greenland, you're going north.

• 42:25Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  So it's a sort of before we have north, south, west, east. You have this inner compass that is also more or less depicted in the houses.

• 42:37Tristan Hughes?

  Goodness.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  We don't have this in numbers, but when I have talked to colleagues of mine. We sort of agree that many of the houses, they are facing the ocean.

• 42:49Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh, that that is incredible. I love that fact right there. I would also point out that if I was sent out to go and hunt up there, I would certainly not return alive. So thank goodness, uh I am.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Search and rescue, right?

• 43:01Tristan Hughes?

  Exactly. Search and rescue uh would have to go there very, very fast. But that's amazing, that kind of layout of the houses that you can see in the archaeology. And do you see that all the way back to some of the earliest Tula um winter houses that survived? So you can see that tradition continuing for centuries?

• 43:19Speaker 01

  It's difficult to say. I mean, because some of the knowledge we have from the oral stories. And it's difficult for us to, I mean, we haven't yet looked into, is this a regional phenomenon? Or is it really widespread in Greenland? And how far back in time does it go? So we do see indications of this. Um, but it's, it's difficult for us to know yet how common an idea it was. But we also need to think about what, because we have the same, some of the same mythology coming from Alaska and Canada.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  What is interesting in Alaskan mythology is, for example, that the raven plays such a huge part in their cosmology. And there, they have a story from Alaska where the raven is one day flying over the, the sea, the ocean. And he sees a whale. He sees this splash coming out. And he gets closer and he allows himself to be swallowed up by this whale. And when the raven comes inside the whale, he finds out there is a woman sitting inside the whale and keeping a lamp.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  And the raven asks her, what are you doing? And she says, I am the keeper of the whale. I am the spirit of the whale. And if I don't tend to this lamp, the whale is going to die. And what is really interesting about that is that some of the houses, for example, um, they do, they did look very organic and roundish. So are they supposed to be representations of a whale? And then you have that soapstone lamp inside that needs to be kept oftentimes by a woman, most times by a woman.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  And that might be um, an idea that was very common at the time. But it's really difficult for us to prove it. But it's, it's just to say that there are ways of interpreting this and understanding it.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened in human history. From the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:39Tristan Hughes?

  Let's talk on something which kind of links in with what you were saying, because you mentioned whales there and you also mentioned musk ox. So as to how much variety was there in the types of animals that they hunted, you know, centuries ago? Do we know much about their hunting techniques and what they hunted?

• 46:57Speaker 01

  We can find some of the bones, for example, on the mittens that were placed right outside of the houses. So in those mittens, we can find some of the bones after what meals they have had. So we do find musk ox and reindeer, seal, a lot of seal, different types of birds, also fish bones, if they were preserved, also sometimes fish bones, foxes and hares and walrus.

• 47:35Tristan Hughes?

  Walrus, wow, okay.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Walrus and narwhal and different parts of whales. Yes, different types of animals that would also tell us what part of the season did they occupy this house, for example. One time we were excavating and there was 10 metres. Away from us where we were excavating, there was a bone from the neck, a neck bone from a whale.

• 48:01Tristan Hughes?

  From the neck, okay, yeah, yeah.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, a spine bone.

• 48:05Tristan Hughes?

  A spine, a neck bone, no, no, it's not a mandible, is it? So, okay, from that part of the whale.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Whale was lying very close to, um, and we were excavating, this was, um, uh, in two thousand and fifteen, and we were excavating the midden of an old kasi. So this assembly house dated back to, uh, the thirteen hundreds. And, uh, it was fun for us to think, maybe they hunted that whale. Because of course whales are really difficult to date because of the marine effect. But we were excavating harpoon heads, um, mainly for walrus. And also, uh, we excavated a lot of tusks from the narwhal as well.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  But one of my colleagues, he managed to find this huge, uh, harpoon head. Measuring around twenty centimeters.

• 49:03Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, okay, that's a big one.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  And that is definitely not for walrus, that is for whale, for that bow ahead whale. So the people that live there might have hunted that whale, which remains, we saw right there.

• 49:19Tristan Hughes?

  Firstly, I love that, um, we're now exploring like midden heaps, you know, kind of the, the prehistoric rubbish heaps that they are. And how much information they can reveal about diets and so on. Uh, and secondly of all, Asta, you mentioning them using harpoons and massive harpoons there. So do we have a good sense of like the types of gadgets that they use to help them? You know, when they're taking down like a narwhal or as you say, a walrus or, or one of these great whales, you know, they had the tools with them. And they had the expertise to, to use them to the best that they could.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  We of course have the tools that you mentioned, but we also know from historic times that, and also from Canada, that you would go hunting for whales.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Sort of cruise. So you had an Inuit whaling crew led by an umyelik. An umyelik means someone who owns this boat, this large boat, because you need that when you go hunting for a whale. And then they would sail out in those umyaks and they will search for a whale. And one person will have the amazing job of being either the bravest of the bravest or the dumbest of the dumb. Because he would need to wear this suit made from, and I probably need to check up on this.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Uh, but made from skins, seal skins. I'm just wondering if it was actually walrus skin, but some skins. You have removed the hair and then it's sewn together to be sort of like a wet suit. And then you would do the amazing thing to be jumping from that boat of safety onto that whale that you want to surprise attack.

• 51:14Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  You throw, you have your friends throwing some harpoons into it with bladders that will keep it from diving.

• 51:25Tristan Hughes?

  Diving, yep.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  And then you need to find the breathing hole on that whale. And then you need to put your lance into it, kill it. So just imagine being, yes, Tom, you are that person. You have been chosen. We like you so much or.

• 51:49Tristan Hughes?

  I don't know if you've, I don't know if you've watched The Lord of the Rings at all, Astor, but there's like Legolas who's on top of one of the big elephants, you know, kind of thing like that. It's, it's that mind boggling bravery slash stupidity or like that heroism, isn't it?

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:03Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  So, uh, but then if you manage to kill the whale, my gosh, you have food for.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Months and blubber and bones and yeah, baleen.

• 52:18Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, the baleen, as we mentioned, the fishing tackle and all of that. Well, I mean, as you mentioned, you know, so much food from one whale. And I can imagine there must have been like mythologically stories of great heroes, right? Taking down a whale and doing that exact thing, going on the whale and, you know, spearing it. You can imagine so many tales being told around the fires in these settlements about these great heroes of old who accomplished it and brought in a great whale for their their community, can't you, with that scene that you've just pictured for us?

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, definitely we have stories like that. And we also need to remember that today, when I read bedtime stories for my kids, I have a book and I have, I read out loud from this. But in the stories, the settings of the stories, it's very social and sort of relational situation. So you could be sitting around forty people gathered together and then you have the great storyteller entering, being really good at remembering all of it and also being great with mimics and gestures and when to lower your voice and when to be really loud, right?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  So it was almost a show before we had TV. But even through all of that entertaining, it's also teaching us what to do, what not to do. Oh, look, he did this stupid thing, don't ever do that. Or he did this amazing thing, so let's all aspire to work on our skills and stuff like that. So definitely inspiring stories to keep people awake. And we also have stories that were supposed to put people to sleep and be boring. Different sort of functions for different stories.

• 54:13Tristan Hughes?

  It's amazing. It's like, you know, yes, as you say, like the Tula Inuit version of Heracles tackling the great, you know, sea beast or or land beast as well. I mean, do we hear of, let's say, are there interactions is perhaps the a neutral word, but is there great combats against the big beast of the land up there, polar bears?

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Yes, that definitely is. And I mean, what a creature to be hunting down, right? So there are stories, but also we see it on ornamentation in some of the we see polar bears, but we also see other animals being depicted as small figurines. So small boys and girls could play with them or throw their miniature hapoon after them practicing, right? But the polar bear had a special place in the heart of the Inuit because sort of as

• 55:15Speaker 01

  humans, it can walk on land and it can also swim in the water. So we sort of are in the same realms. And also because it can probably look very human like in a way. And you see mother polar bear is taking care of its cubs and and it can stand on two feet just like humans. So the polar bear also had a close relationship. And we see that in the pictures and in figurines. They are also in some of the stories of an angakok. So when you train

• 55:54Speaker 01

  to become a shaman of the settlement, there are gruesome stories about what you need to endure to become the right set of mind to to be sort of able to negotiate and see the other invincible world with the spirits. But you had to be eaten up whole by a polar bear.

• 56:23Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, goodness. No, no, thank you. Yeah.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  That's just a part of the training. And if you could do that and still be alive and sane, then maybe you could become an Angakok.

• 56:35Tristan Hughes?

  Well, hang on, but you have to be eaten by a polar bear and survive it. I don't think that works.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  So it's probably symbolic, but how that really worked, that's still up for questions. But it just tells it how important a role the polar bear plays. We see it as this animal of strength and probably also intelligence, even though other animals, just like the raven, was also intelligent. So, yeah.

• 57:07Tristan Hughes?

  I saw I could ask so many more questions about so many different things. I think I'll skip over asking more about the shamans, but they sound a bit kind of like the druids, or maybe not druids, but got a link to nature, but you know, who can talk with the supernatural and have a lot of, we can presume, you know, back even centuries and centuries ago, when the Tuilinuit arrived, they hold a big place in societies and that's kind of what we can imagine from them.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the Angakok was the sort of spiritual advisor of a settlement. Sometimes he was the same, he or she, it could be a man or woman. Sometimes this person would also be the leader of the pack, so to say. But other times it could be another hunter who was just respectful and he had authority. And then he would be the leader. So sometimes it would be two different roles, the Angakok and then the leader.

• 58:05Tristan Hughes?

  And going quickly also on to arts, you mentioned earlier, like miniature polar bear figurines that had been discovered. Is most of the arts that you find in these settlements, is it animalistic? Is it always depicting animals? Or what types of art should we be thinking of?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  We also sometimes have figures looking like humans. But actually, in the Tula culture, the Inuit culture, we don't see so many carvings and so much ornamentation as we see in the Dorset culture.

• 58:39Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  The Dorset culture, we see the pictures of humans and it's much more, such a rich material to look into. So why the Inuit culture later on were too lazy to do it? I don't know, but the Dorset culture have amazing source material to look into. The ornamentations and what they depict and how lifelike they are. But we also have amazing find from, actually from my hometown. It's eight mummies and they are called the Killekitok mummies. And they are dated back to fourteen, the mid fourteen hundreds.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  And what is amazing here is how well preserved they are. And so we find all their skin clothing, inner clothes and outer clothes. And they got some extra clothing. So you have a handful of women and then two boys. And they have been put to rest with the skin clothing. But on some of the women, at least one of the women, she has facial tattoos.

• 59:58Tristan Hughes?

  Tattoos, okay.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Because their skin is so well preserved, you can see their nails. I believe you can even see the lashes on some of their eyes. It's amazing. And there you really feel like you are staring into the people of the past.

• 1:00:17Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, we, yeah, we've got to talk about this then.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  You need to look that up, even though it might look a little scary. But it's such an amazing find and such a rich find. And it tells us a lot about what sort of diseases could they have at the time. It's amazing.

• 1:00:33Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's talk about that quickly as well because we did an episode last year on the Siberian ice mummies. And they did recent research on, you know, with the skin surviving on those mummies high up in the Altai Mountains. They were able to figure out how they were tattooed and actually the method they probably used to get, you know, the pictures on their skin. So do we know a lot then? You use that example from your hometown just then. Do we have a quite a rich corpus of understanding about how the Tula Inuit, how they buried their dead? How they looked after their deceased relatives?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  We have um stone graves, burials in the landscape. And oftentimes they are connected to settlements that we have already registered. So you have a settlement and then around the periphery. Of course, depending on the landscape itself, if it's very rocky or if it's very flat. That will tell us where the periphery is. And also depending on, is it a very stony area? But then we find the graves and oftentimes they would be burying one person within one grave. But we also see examples uh from Sissimut.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  When they were clearing out to make the new airport, well, new back then, airport. They found a grave where you had buried one person, but then you had reused it. So you had pushed the bones a little aside and then buried a new person. And I believe it was six or seven times you had done that. Then we find the graves are often also sometimes up in the mountain or in in the back and they have.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Oftentimes really beautiful views. And when, when you look at the oral stories, you can also see this close connection to some of their favourite sites. So there is no doubt in my mind that sometimes before you died, you could say, I really want to be buried here or there. But then you could be buried behind the settlement. And you could be buried with the clothes that you were wearing, of course, but also your hunting gear if you were a man, and your sewing kit if you were a woman, and also your cooking pot. So that's Soapstone Land, for example, or a cooking pot itself.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  If we also see small children being buried with a dog, for example, so maybe it was a favourite animal or friend, or maybe this dog was supposed to help you to the next world, to the realm of death, and accompany the, the child on that journey.

• 1:03:30Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, I like that, mentioning the dog at the end, you know, once again, Muddy, know that they also had pets with them as well, um, for their day to day lives and how similar they are to us today. As I also love this idea, maybe, as you say, of, of course, as you mentioned, the settlements have been along the coast, your human habitation is along the coast, as it is today. You know, someone from one of those communities, seeing the snowy wilderness, like the centre of Greenland, thinking like, I'd like to be buried up there in the wildness, in the wild lands, or myths of people who went into the snowy wastelands and, you know, did, did great deeds. It's, it's, it's an amazing landscape to think about and how they survived and how

• 1:04:13Tristan Hughes?

  they viewed, as you've highlighted, their worldview of the natural world around them. I wish I could ask so many more questions. We may well have to get you back on in the future for another one. But is there any message that you would like to, um, closing remarks for this episode that you'd like to leave us with, with the story of prehistoric Greenland?

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Well, the prehistory of Greenland is just so rich in its material, but also on the different perspectives that it teaches us about humans that entered that part of the world. So I think it's a, it's a good chance to get to know more about Greenland and the history there, that all of a sudden became the eye of the storm. But what is it actually? What part, what kind of a home is it to, to what kind of people?

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  And when we look closely, we often find out or rediscover that we are not so different. We can recognize you like the idea of the dog being buried with the child, right? And we oftentimes see those things, even in the forest culture that we imagine, oh, I'm, I'm never gonna be able to recognize myself in this. But then again, we are just humans and we have just made homes on different parts of the same world. And we have different conditions, but some of the same feelings and problems.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Tristan Hughes?

  Asa, absolutely. And it's been wonderful to shine a light on the prehistoric story of Greenland, the amazing archaeological sites and artifacts that survive, entwined with mythology. What a rich area of the world to learn more about its distant past in, in the years to head. It must be so exciting for you and everyone else. Tell us finally about yourself. You're currently in Copenhagen and you're doing your own particular work on this at the moment.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Yes, I am a prehistoric archaeologist and I am working on a new project.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Called Liquidise. So we will be looking into the climate changes in Greenland and what effect it has on the communities there. But also for the potentials of hydropower, for example. So we want to be engaging with people on the ground and seeing into what kind of future do they want or do they see? And as an archaeologist, it's really enriching to knowing so much about the past, but also to be asking people today, not in this project, but in other projects that I'm in.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  What do you want to revive? Or what do you want to discuss from our past? And what do we want to take with us into the future? So I'm also talking with architects, for example, of do you want to, do they want to be inspired by prehistoric archaeological house models, for example, or by the stories? It can be intangible cultural heritage as well that the architects could be inspired by. So that the houses in Greenland or the buildings in Greenland

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  aren't just houses that could have been built anywhere on this planet, but they could be more cultural specific. And people could mirror themselves in that architecture. I think that would be amazing.

• 1:08:15Tristan Hughes?

  Very cool. Bring back the winter houses. Asta, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 1:08:32Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was the fantastic Dr. Asta Münster talking you through the remarkable archaeology, the prehistory of Greenland and the people who have lived there for centuries. It's such a remarkable story. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode just as much as I did, recording it alongside my producer, Joseph. We were both listening intently to Asta telling the story. And yeah, what a story it is. I can't praise Asta enough. So once again, really hope you enjoyed this episode and thank you for listening. If you did enjoy the episode, if you do enjoy the ancients, please make sure that you're following the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. So please do that. If you'd also be kind

• 1:09:17Tristan Hughes?

  enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd also really appreciate that. So all of those things really, really helpful to us and allow us to keep doing what we do, sharing these incredible stories, prehistoric stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible and promoting the work of experts like Asta. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That is all from me and I will see you in the next episode.