Talk:Therkel Mathiassen

Inugsuk is not Norse

Mathiassen's Inugsuk site in NW Greenland was not Norse, as suggested in the text. The occupants (Mathiassen's "Inugsuk culture") represented a Thule-based Inuit culture with a number of Norse loan artefacts, including a wooden stave-built tub; however, both the dwelling and the large majority of artefacts were typically Inuit. Mathiassen dated the site to the 14th century AD - a time when the Inuit were still expanding into northern Greenland from the west and had barely reached area of the Norse colonies in southern West Greenland. The Norse themselves never established colonies as far north as Inugsuk.--Death Bredon (talk) 21:16, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Solberg's "Stone Age Culture"

It is not quite correct to say that Mathiassen "dismissed" Solberg's idea of a "Stone Age culture" in Greenland. The Thule culture itself ws a "Stone Age culture" in the sense that it had no actual metallurgy; local cold hammering of native copper (Coronation Gulf) or meteoric iron (Thule District) does not qualify as metallurgy. Solberg proposed -- on the basis of archaeological collections from Greenland -- that there had been two stages of the "Greenland Stone Age": an earlier one with knapped (chipped) stone and a later one with polished (ground) stone. Though Solberg's theory was apparently based on a parallel from Europe (chipped stone Paleolithic, ground stone Neolithic) rather than on stratigraphy or other methods of dating, it was essentially correct; the later stage was Mathiassen's Thule culture (c. 1200 AD-) and the earlier stage actually consisted of several cultures, beginning in West Greenland with Saqqaq some time in the third millennium BC and ending with the Dorset culture in the mid-first millennium AD. Mathiassen discovered Thule in Canada in 1921-23 and opined that the chipped stone sites found by himself and others represented a later variant of Thule. Diamond Jenness recognized the chipped stone component a separate culture in 1925 and named it the Cape Dorset culture, suggesting that it was older than Thule. By the time Mathiassen began to work in Greenland (1929), the evidence that Dorset was a separate entity was piling up, but I don't recall that he said anything specific about Solberg's theories. Dorset was generally accepted as a separate culture in the 1930's, and its chronological position as earlier that Thule was confirmed by Henry Collins at the Crystal II site on Baffin Island on stratigraphical grounds in 1948, years before radiocarbon was used for dating.--Death Bredon (talk) 21:45, 26 February 2011 (UTC)