414 P''of- NordensMoId — Expedition to Greenland. 



cottages or tents has produced. On taking a few spadefuls of earth, 

 or on examining the walls of the new houses, — generally built with 

 turf taken from these spots, — one everywhere finds the earth and 

 grass-roots mixed with the bones of the animals which the Green- 

 landers hunt. The animals killed by the men are in fact cleansed by 

 the women beside or in the cottage itself, and the refuse after the 

 cleansing or the meal is thrown away — seJ.dom far from the cottage- 

 door. EA^en now, in the course of years, a heap is frequently collected 

 as truly circular as if it had been drawn with a pair of compasses 

 round the door as a centre. On examining its contents, it is found to 

 consist of a black, fat earth, formed of decayed refuse — frequently 

 bits of bone gnawed asunder and broken, shells, especially those of 

 Mytilus, lost or broken household goods, etc. This bone-mixed earth 

 most likely contains, like guano, not only considerable quantities of 

 phosphoric acid, but also ammoniac salts, and it may happen that 

 the trade of Greenland may find in this a valuable article of export. 



As the kitchenmidden date^s from the Stone-age in Greenland, — 

 which undoubtedly extended beyond the epoch at which the whalers 

 first began to visit these coasts, — we find in it points of arrows, skin- 

 scrapers, and other instruments of various kinds in stone, and 

 especially a mass of stone-flakes knocked off in forming the instru- 

 ments, easily recognizable, not only by their form, but by their being 

 of a species of stone — chalcedony, agate, and especially green jasper 

 (called by the Greenlanders "angmak"), not met with in the gneiss 

 formation, but only at certain spots in the basalt region of Disko or 

 the peninsula of Noursoak. One sometimes finds smaller instru- 

 ments of clear quartz, as also half-wrought crystals of the same 

 mineral. Everything shows that the material was carefully chosen 

 among such minerals as united the necessary hardness with absence 

 of cleavage, and a flat conchoidal fracture. Among minerals in 

 general, the different varieties of quartz (rock crystal, agate, 

 chalcedony, flint, and jasper) are the only ones which fully satisfy 

 these conditions ; and it is therefore almost exclusively these minerals 

 that the various races of men have chosen for making their chipped 

 (not ground) stone instruments. 



The two largest of the old house sites, among which we were now 

 resting, lay so near the sea that their bases were washed by the water. 

 A small stream had found its way through one of them, and had thus 

 not only exposed a profile of the kitchenmidden, but also subjected 

 a part of it to a washing process, in consequence of which bits of 

 bone and other heavier objects lay clean washed at the bottom of the 

 kennel and in the hollows of the gneiss slabs of the shore. These 

 were carefully examined, and a number of stone instruments and 

 stone chips were collected. There were no traces of iron, but a 

 small piece of copper — an oval perforated piece — which had evidently 

 once served as an ornament. At the largest site a tolerably thick 

 round stone wall, 8 or 10 feet high, and 26 in section, was still dis- 

 tinguishable, divided into two unequal portions by a party-wall. 

 The entrance seems to have led into the larger of these areas, 

 judging from the extensive kitchenmidden situate just outside it. 



