Dipterous remains and archaeological interpretation

Fossil flies from archaeological settlements can give information on details of everyday life, hygiene, disease and death. Previous work is reviewed and recent research on material from a Greenlandic farm shows the range of the technique and highlights its potential to reconstruct important aspects of human activities that otherwise go unnoticed.     

Navigating the binaries of island independence and dependence in Greenland: Decolonisation,political culture,and strategic services

Over the past decades, islands and archipelagos undergoing decolonisation have opted not to pursue independence. Many have instead become autonomous subnational island jurisdictions (SNIJs), maintaining links with their former colonisers in order to gain economic, social, and political benefits. The age of island independence movements has largely ceased. One exception is Greenland, an SNIJ in which the public overwhelmingly favours independence from Denmark. This desire for independence is linked to a binary understanding of Greenlandic identity and Danish identity as well as a binary understanding of independence and dependence. Greenland's colonial experience has trapped it in a Denmark-oriented conceptualisation of Greenlandic identity, which prevents the pursuit of potential political and economic futures, for example gaining economic benefits through the provision of strategic services to a patron state. This study demonstrates how island status and centre-periphery relations can influence political culture and, by considering the exceptional case of a present-day island independence movement, sheds light on the dynamics of island-mainland relations more generally.     

Paleo-Eskimo kitchen midden preservation in permafrost under future climate conditions at Qajaa,West Greenland

Remains from Paleo-Eskimo cultures are well-documented, but complete preservation is rare. Two kitchen middens in Greenland are known to hold extremely well-preserved organic artefacts. Here, we assess the fate of the Qajaa site in Western Greenland under future climate conditions based on site characteristics measured in situ and from permafrost cores. Measurements of thermal properties, heat generation, oxygen consumption and CO₂ production show that the kitchen midden can be characterized as peat but produces 4–7 times more heat than natural sediment. An analytical model from permafrost research has been applied to assess future thawing of the midden. Results show that the preservation conditions are controlled by freezing temperatures and a high water/ice content limiting the subsurface oxygen availability. Threats to the future preservation are related to thawing followed by drainage and increasing subsurface oxygen availability and heat generation. The model predicts that the unique 4000-year-old Saqqaq layer below more than 1 m of peat is adequately protected against thawing for the next 70 years.     

Greenland in the center: what happened when the Danish–Norwegian officials met English and Dutch whalers in Disko Bay, 1780–1820

Between 1780 and 1820 crucial changes took place in the economic and cultural relationship between Denmark–Norway and its North Atlantic dependencies. In Greenland, the state imposed a stringent set of social and economic controls, at the same time when the restrictions on trade in Iceland and Northern Norway were relaxed. In 1776 the Royal Greenlandic Trading Company was established, but during the eighteenth century the waters around Greenland were a hub of international whaling trade as Dutch, American, and British ships came into contact with the Inuit, who were legally under Danish-Norwegian social regulation. This article uses records of Danish officials in Greenland and those of incidental observers to understand the disjuncture between the law of Denmark–Norway and the realities of Disko Bay. The officials contended with better equipped foreign ships, the Inuit desire to trade with these ships, and communication problems with the capital. This period is characterized by experimentation with different methods of production, contrasting strongly with the later nineteenth century, in which Danish–Greenlandic policy became more restrictive. By the nineteenth century international whaling trade had followed the declining whale stocks westward to the Canadian and American waters, so Denmark-Norway could impose these restrictions more easily.     

The Future Preservation of a Permanently Frozen Kitchen Midden in Western Greenland

Abstract

Archaeological materials may be extraordinarily well preserved in Arctic areas, where permanently frozen conditions in the ground slow down the decay of materials such as wood, bone, ?esh, hair, and DNA. However, the mean annual air temperature in the Arctic is expected to increase by between 2·5 to 7·5°C by the end of the twenty-?rst century. This may have a signi?cant warming effect on the soil and could lead to permafrost thaw and degradation of currently frozen archaeological remains. Here we present a four-year monitoring and research project taking place at Qajaa in the Disko Bay area in West Greenland. Qajaa is a large kitchen midden, containing frozen remains from 4000 years of inhabitation, from when the ?rst Palaeo-Eskimos entered Greenland, until the site was abandoned in the eighteenth century. The purpose of the project is to investigate current preservation conditions through ?eld and laboratory measurements and to evaluate possible threats to the future preservation.

Preliminary results show that the archaeological material at Qajaa is still very well preserved, but some microbial decay is observed in the exposed wooden artefacts that thaw every summer. Maximum temperatures are above 0°C in the upper 40–50 cm of the midden and between 0 and ?2°C down to 3 m depth. Thereby the permafrost may be vulnerable to quite small increases in air temperatures. Laboratory measurements show that the decay of the archaeological wood in the midden is temperature-dependent, with rates increasing 11–12% every time the soil temperature increases 1°C. Moreover, the soil organic material produces heat when decomposed, which could have an additional warming effect on the midden. At the moment the water or ice content within the midden is high, limiting the subsurface oxygen availability. Threats to the future preservation are related to further thawing followed by drainage, increased oxygen availability, microbial decay of the organic material, and heat production.     

The coral Cothonion from the lower Cambrian of North Greenland

Originally described from the Coonigan Formation of New South Wales, Australia, a second occurrence of the operculate coral Cothonion sympomatum is here described from the Paralledal Formation of North Greenland. Both finds are of late early Cambrian age, Series 2, Stage 4 in the emerging fourfold classification of the Cambrian. The new find supports widespread distribution patterns seen in early Cambrian Small Shelly Fossils, although associated trilobites belong to traditional redlichiid (Australia) and olenellid (Greenland) realms, respectively.     

URBANIZATION IN THE USSR: PROBLEMS OF SPATIAL DIFFERENTIATION

The process of formation of settlement systems “in the USSR is conceptualized as proceeding at eight levels of a hierarchy corresponding to the system of economic regions, from a national system down to rayon-level systems. An important element in the present process of urbanization is the formation of urban agglomerations. The fact that these urban entities still lack juridical or even statistical status deprives urban and economic planners of a valuable data base for planning purposes so that the agglomerations often evolve in undesirable, uncoordinated ways. Greater attention needs to be given to the study of the internal structure of urban entities, a field neglected by Soviet population geographers. An undesirable tendency in Soviet agglomerations is to aim at continuously built-up territory, thus converting agglomerations into traditional compact cities, instead of making provision for open spaces for use in agriculture and forestry, recreation and communications.     

Stable Isotopes and Oral Tori in Greenlandic Norse and Inuit

Palatine (PT) and mandibular torus (MT) have long been of interest to dental researchers and anthropologists, but their aetiology remains unresolved. Some combination of genetic and environmental factors influences their expression, but the relative role of each remains contentious. Previous research has shown that the Greenlandic Norse exhibit exceptionally high frequencies and pronounced expressions of PT and MT. In this regard, they are significantly different from genetically related medieval Scandinavian populations, so environmental factors have to be considered. An earlier study that estimated stable carbon and nitrogen isotope compositions for a Greenlandic Norse sample makes it possible to compare directly PT and MT expression with the relative degree of marine protein intake. For comparative purposes, parallel observations were made on a Greenlandic Inuit sample. Some researchers suggest the intake of marine resources could impact bone development, including torus expression, but our analysis found no significant correlation between PT or MT expression and δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values in the Norse. In the Inuit, PT expression also showed no relationship to stable isotope compositions. MT size in the Inuit did, however, show a significant inverse relationship with δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values. As MT size goes up, stable isotope compositions go down. Compared with contemporary European populations, the Greenlandic Norse show very positive isotope compositions, but the Inuit, with their high protein‐high fat diet, show significantly higher δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values than the Norse. It is unclear how this relates to the contrasting findings for MT size and stable isotope values. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.