Aasivissuit og Arnangarnup Qoorua

by Pauline Kleinschmidt Knudsen, Greenland National Museum
On Greenland’s west coast, nestled far in behind one of the deepest fjords, we find two hunting areas, Aasivissuit and Eqalummiut (also known as Paradise Valley). As far back as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Inuit hunters were pursuing reindeer though this magnificent landscape in the hinterlands and were hunting whales in the outer coastal areas between Sisimiut and Qeqertarsuaq (Disko Island).

The richness of this area was known far and wide and the Inuit people who came to Paradise Valley were coming exclusively from Greenland’s south coast. However, not only did the Inuit people come to hunt. In this area, there was also a busy trade with the attractive soapstone, which can easily be carved into lamps and pots, and whalebones, which could be used for making fishing line. The South Greenlandic Inuits were working as traders, who exchanged what they could for the finest soapstone while in transit and exchanged the soapstone, in turn, for whalebones in the more northern regions.

European whalers were also aware of the area’s riches. From the seventeenth century and on, they started to hunt whales in the area, alongside the Inuit people. The Europeans brought along with them, glass beads and needles of metal, among other things, which they exchanged with the local hunters.

Trans-cultural meetings
The fact that so many different kinds of people were converging in the area resulted in a significant enrichment of the culture.

Not only were Inuits from many different parts of Greenland’s west coast exchanging ideas here. The Europeans who were otherwise foreign to these parts were also being called into the encounter. Contacts running across all kinds of demographic and geographic boundaries were generated and in the evenings, the Inuits and Europeans amused themselves in each other’s company with dancing and storytelling.

This multi-cultural convergence still characterizes the Greenlandic society today. You can see this in the material-related culture and you can also hear it in the folk tales. The pearl embroideries on the Greenlandic national costumes are a manifestation of the luxury contact that was established with the European trappers-whalers-sealers. Legends related to the cultural encounters are transmitted orally through generations and today, these form part of the treasure chest of Greenlandic sagas. And the dances that Greenlanders presently refer to as “kalattuut,” meaning “the Greenlandic dances,” are actually European folk dances as the Inuits learned them from the whalers.

On the trail of the trappers-whalers-sealers
The primary prerequisite for the bustling activity in the area was the abundant wildlife, both in the sea and on land. The Inuit people spent most of the year at smaller settlements along the coasts, because their most important source of food was to be found in the ocean. You can still see the ruins of the Inuit people’s houses, which were built of stone and peat, in many places along the coast and this plays witness to the hunter-sealer-whalers’ dealings. At sea the Inuits hunted seals, walruses and whales. Fishing also had a certain importance.

Aasivissuit and Eqalummiut are located in the sub-continent’s largest ice-free land area, where the reindeer population can sometimes be very large. During the first half of the eighteenth century, there were an unusually large number of reindeer in the area. This played a role in making the region even more attractive to a population that was nourishing itself with hunting and fishing.

In the area, there are also relics from the Danish-Norwegian colonization of the country in the eighteenth century. Out in the archipelago, on the island of Nipisat, you can see the foundation of the fort that was erected in 1728 as part of an effort to secure the colonists’ hauls from whaling expeditions made in the area.

Inland settlements and the hunt for reindeer
Because of the abundant resources, many Inuit people spent the summer in areas situated deeply within the Inland’s fjords, where they hunted reindeer. Aasivissuit and Eqalummiut, in the eastern section of this area, are some of the largest inland settlements we know about.

Near Aasivissuit, very extensive systems of cairns and stone-built hunters’ shelters can be found; these were used during the reindeer hunts. The settlement and the hunting layouts were arranged into a “bottleneck” in the landscape through which the reindeer were compelled to pass on their migrations between the hinterland and the coast.

Eqalummiut is situated in Angujaartorfiup Nunaa, which attracted reindeer hunters from many parts of Greenland’s west coast. Subsequent years of archaeological investigations have provided a good picture of the intensive hunting activity being practiced in the area – and especially in the landscape areas close to the inland’s icecap on Greenland’s longest lake, Tasersiaq.

The special climatic conditions in Greenland have brought about the situation that many hunting tracks are well preserved. For this reason, a countless number of traces attesting to activity can be spotted in this lush inland area – including ruins of stone-built tent houses, tent rings (remnants of the stones that once held the tent’s canvas in place), stone-built repositories for meat, tombs, cairns, hunters’ shelters and cairn systems.

What makes this area unique are the undisturbed cultural landscapes, where it can clearly be seen how the Inuit managed to figure out how to take advantage of the landscape when hunting for reindeer. When we connect the surviving physical relics with the knowledge that still exists today about hunting and the hunters’ use of the landscape, we find ourselves standing before an outstanding opportunity to study the Inuit peoples’ hunting traditions, both then and now.

Here, you can also explore the Inuit people’s principles governing the location of their settlements, their hunting procedures, and their hunting territories’ placements – both with respect to the landscape and in relation to each other.

Life as it was lived 4,000 years ago
It was not only the seventeenth and eighteenth century whalers-sealers and hunters that found the region around Aasivissuit and Arnangarnuåp Qoorua attractive. Already, the Stone Age’s first people on Greenland, who belonged to the so-called “Saqqaq culture,” were active in the area.

Traces of the Saqqaq culture, which flourished 2800-4000 years ago, can still be seen in certain places in the landscape, where you can come across tent rings and dung yard sites. Just as we can similarly say about the much later Inuits’ settlements, we also find the Saqqaq culture’s residences both in the fjords and deep inside the terrain, near the inland ice cap. Despite the several thousand years between the two cultures, the hunting methods and techniques were very similar – and both were dependent upon the animals’ migrations.

Aasivissuit and Arnangarnup Qoorua as World Heritage sites
The cultural landscapes and the traces of the old trapping-whaling-sealing cultures in these areas offer outstanding testimony regarding various Arctic cultures’ lifestyles over the course of 4,500 years: a way of life that has been conditioned by an intimate knowledge of the environment and of the animals, replete with a remarkable ability to combine the sea’s and the inland’s fluctuating quantities of wild resources through the ages. For these reasons, these cultural landscapes are hereby proposed as candidates for inclusion on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.