ARCHEOLOGY OF GREENLAND— MATHIASSEN 403 



Greenland in the sixteenth century the Norsemen had disappeared, 

 having died out — only the ruins of their houses told that the land 

 had formerly been peopled by a white race. "VVliat had happened? 



The Norsemen first met the Eskimos about 1200, on hunting trips 

 to the northwest coast; as the Inugsuk find showed, there had been 

 some connection between Norsemen and Eskimos. The Eskimos only 

 inhabited the west coast as far south as the climate was Arctic, with 

 that winter ice which was necessary for their ice hunting and dog 

 sledges. But in the fourteenth century the Eskimos began to move 

 southward. About 1350 they attacked and destroyed the Norse 

 "Western Settlement", and in 1379 we hear about the first attack on 

 the "Eastern Settlement." And now the Norse colonization began 

 quickly to decline. 



The Norsemen were then already a degenerate race, as Dr. Poul 

 Norlund's excavations in the churchyard at Herjolfsnes has shown: 

 they were sick, undernourished, degenerate, and weak. The Norse- 

 men, of course, looked with contempt on the Eskimos, these small, 

 black heathen; and they probably killed them whenever they met. 

 But the Eskimos had a fighting method of their own : they attacked 

 the Norsemen individually and from behind with their very effec- 

 tive weapons, bows and slings; or they burned the Norse houses, 

 after having blocked up the doors. The tales of the Greenlanders 

 relate how the last chief of the Norsemen, Ungortoq, fled out of his 

 burning house with his little son in his arms, and then, when the 

 Eskimos pursued him, threw the boy into a lake so that he should not 

 be taken alive. 



The Norse colonies disappeared and the Eskimos plundered the 

 habitations, which explains how they got all those Norse objects 

 which we now find in the old Eskimo ruins. The Norsemen cer- 

 tainly did not break their church bells voluntarily so that the Es- 

 kimos might make hammers or eardrops out of the fragments. 



Halfway up the fiords we now find the ruins of these, the oldest 

 Eskimos villages; there they could still do some hunting from the 

 ice in the winter, as they were accustomed to from their northern 

 home. But later they scattered all over the country and also onto 

 the outer skerries; their Kayak technique was now suflSciently de- 

 veloped to stand the south Greenland winter. 



The later houses at Tugtutoq belong to this period, the seventeenth 

 and eighteenth centuries. The houses are now big, square communal 

 dwellings for several families, each containing 30 to 50 persons. 

 The walls were of stones and turf, the floor paved with flat stones, the 

 platform and roof of driftwood. It was the kind of house still used 

 when the Danish colonization of Greenland began with Hans Egede 

 in 1721, and which is still used in Angmagssalik on the east coast. 



112059—37 27 



