Monographs on Greenland – serie

Count Eigil Knuth succeeded in finding a Palaeo-Eskimo settlement named "Old Nuulliit" on the well-known Nuulliit site in the Thule area. This site was settled by the first immigrants to Greenland -- a hitherto unknown culture group, "the Old Nuulliit Culture", which was closely related to Palaeo-Eskimo culture groups in Alaska. Knuth never published his findings, which be-came a mystery in Arctic archaeology. New investigations by the author of the material shows that the site was settled repeatedly by the first immigrants between 2500 BC and 1900 BC, and in addition that a total of ten family groups of the Pre-Dorset culture had settled there -- the first real settlement of the Pre-Dorset culture in Greenland. The finds underscore the cultural and historical diversity of the Thule area.

This book covers the discovery and history of the most northern breeding population of Peregrine Falcons in the world, near Thule Air Base in north-west Greenland (75.9-77.6° N). Although the region was explored by scientific expeditions as early as 1818, Peregrines were not documented in the area until the 1930s. By the early 1990s the population had become well established, with a warming climate enabling Peregrines from further south to expand their breeding range northward. Here Burnham and his co-authors present their comprehensive findings on the biology and ecology of this population based on thirteen years of research from 1993 to 2005.

Greenland views itself as being on the way to sovereignty. This image -- and the tensions involved in it -- structure the triangular relation between the EU, Greenland and Denmark. The central Other of Greenland has for a couple of centuries been Denmark, the colonial overlord. The national identity discourses of Greenland and Denmark both idealise national homogeneity. A central condition for a continuation of Rigsfællesskabet, the community of the realm including Greenland and Denmark, is the idea that Greenland still needs external assistance in its development towards independence -- and that this idea can be formulated in a way which does not infantilise Greenland metaphorically. As part of the post-colonial diversification of Greenlands dependency, the bilateral relation between Denmark and Greenland has gradually been opened up to involve other others. Meanwhile, a discourse prognosticates that climate change is opening up the Arctic to minerals extraction and commerce. In these circumstances, the triangular relation with the EU is played out as a series of rhetorical and practical sovereignty games, in Nuuk, Copenhagen and Brussels. Particularly, a number of strategies are employed to minimise the apparent role of Denmark for the Greenlandic relations to the EU.

This volume presents the results of an interview survey among Greenland subsistence hunters on walruses and the catch of walruses in West and Northwest Greenland. In these areas, the catch of walruses is still an important part of the traditional subsistence hunting culture. The Greenland walrus hunting grounds have experienced marked environmental changes due to climate change and quotas were introduced for the catch across all of Greenland in 2006. Thus, we wanted to explore how these changes had affected the local communities by interviewing seventy-six experienced walrus hunters living in twenty-two settlements and towns along the ca. 1,700 km coast from Maniitsoq in the south to Siorapaluk in the north. The interviews resulted in a wealth of detailed information about how climate changes and introduction of quotas have affected the walruses and the walrus hunting practice. The main text summarises the broad findings while more details are provided in the individual hunter statements in four appendices.