Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 17

Approaches to the Greenlanders
Figure 1. Hvalso Church, ca 1300 (after Magnusen & Rafn 1838-45). One of the ear-
liest illustrations.
realm perhaps only 20 or 30 years later.
Hans Egede’s excavation at Hvalso
makes him an early European scientist in
the non-European world, not least in the
context of his perceptive descriptions of
several visited Norse sites, including
Hvalso (cf. Appendix below). Indeed, the
search for the Norsemen made Egede an
early student of archaeological remains
and ancient material culture. On Hvalso
Church, Egede writes in his diary for
1723, as published fifteen years later
(Egede 1738, 114; cf. Albrethsen 1971):
"The 29th [of August], which was a
Sunday, after prayer and divine service,
when the Greenlanders [Inuit/Eskimos]
also were present, whom I likewise taught
the importance of these things, I attempted
towards the evening to excavate and
remove a great dea! of stones inside the
structure, in the thought to fmd some
Monumenta [memorials] of Antiqviteter
[artefacts of old], but did not find anything
apart from some coal and bones and sherds
of ceramic vessels. But since we were not
equipped with proper instruments for dig-
ging, we could not get very deep into the
ground. In the beginning, the Greenlanders
would not permit us to excavate in the
abandoned ruins, pretending, that the
Kablunakker [Norsemen] buried there
would do something harmful to them,
when we had left, since we would disturb
them with our digging. These local
Greenlanders much insisted that we would
come South to live with them. They also
informed that in a fiord to the East, which
they called Iggalik, were even more and
larger walled structures than these, and
even a lovely plain with grass and wood
etc. ..."
Egede also describes Hvalso church in
architectural detail, cf. Appendix (Egede
1738, 113£).
Egede’s investigations were quickly
followed by several others in the mid- to
late eighteenth century, even in the form
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