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Discovering Helluland

Were Vikings the first travellers encountered by Dorset Inuit?

JANE GEORGE

HULL, QUEBEC — Sometime during the early years of the last millennium, about 1,000 years ago, Vikings from Greenland met up with Inuit in the Eastern Arctic.

These "Skraelings," as Viking sagas called the Inuit, were a fierce people.

An exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, called Strangers, Partners, Neighbours? explores the legacy of those long-ago encounters between Inuit and early travellers.

It highlights recent findings from the museum’s Helluland Archeology Project. Helluland is the name the sagas gave to the land of rocks and glaciers the Vikings found west of Greenland.

Most scholars believe Helluland was actually Baffin Island.

The exhibition displays many curious artifacts found in Nunavut and Labrador that show elements foreign to Dorset Inuit culture.

Uncertainty about the age and origin of the artifacts continues to raise questions about the nature and timing of contact between Inuit and foreign mariners. For instance, were Greenlandic Vikings even the first travellers Dorset Inuit met?

"Yes, I think so," says archeologist Patricia Sutherland somewhat hesitantly.

Sutherland, who is leading the Helluland Archeology Project and who curated the CMC exhibition, can’t rule out the possibility of earlier visits by Irish monks or other seafaring peoples. That’s why, when talking about these visitors’ identity, she prefers the term "early Europeans" to Vikings.

Sutherland feels the visitors came from Europe because items very similar to those found in the Eastern Arctic have been found in other places settled by Europeans and in Europe.

"I don’t see anyone coming up from South America or coming over from the west coast of Canada," she says.

Accurately dating these artifacts is now the "number one question" because the results may determine who these first outsiders really were.

Among the pieces included in the Helluland exhibition are a three-metre length of yarn and a shorter remnant of two-ply yarn. Experts say artisans skilled in the craft of spinning made the yarn from Arctic hare, fox and dog fur — but it’s impossible to know who made it.

"The potential is there that if the contact was extensive enough that Dorset women may have learned this technology from Europeans," Sutherland says.

The yarn comes from a site called Nunguvik, 100 kilometres west of Pond Inlet. Radiocarbon dating, which measures the breakdown of organic materials in an object, shows it was made sometime from 700 to 800.

If this estimate is accurate, it means the yarn predates the Vikings’ travels down the North American coast by a few hundred years.

"We’ve had a lot of problems with radiocarbon dating over the years," Sutherland says.

She believes the yarn will eventually date to 1200 or 1300 because, stylistically, it’s similar to yarn that’s been found from this period at Viking sites in Greenland.

"I just don’t know right now," she says. "This is the most immediate challenge for the project, sorting out the timing."

On display are also many wooden artifacts that do date from 1200 to 1300, from the period Vikings were known to be living in Greenland and travelling to North America.

Some of these wooden pieces have notches and square nail holes. A few are made of white pine or balsam, a wood not found anywhere nearby, and show evidence of woodworking techniques found in Viking and medieval European settlements.

The odd headgear on people depicted in many carvings also hints at contact between Inuit and "strangers, partners, [and] neighbours."

An antler wand found on Axel Heiberg Island has two opposing faces. One is a broad rounded face that looks much like the faces Dorset Inuit generally carved. At the other end, there’s a more European-looking face with heavy eyebrows and a beard.

A much larger exhibition, called Vikings: the North Atlantic Saga on loan from Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institute, is also at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

It includes many other artifacts found in Nunavut that bear witness to contact between Vikings and Inuit, such as a piece of chain mail, scraps of material, smelted iron, a set of bronze balances for weighing as well as a carpenter’s plane.

There is also a figure that was found near Kimmirut and made by Dorset Inuit around 1200. This tiny wooden man is apparently dressed in a long, split-front robe with trim — the kind of outfit Vikings likely wore.

This summer, Sutherland will continue excavations at this site near Kimmirut.

The exhibitions on Helluland and the Vikings can be seen at the CMC, 100 Laurier St. in Hull, until October 14.

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