Arctic Studies News!

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A Tale of Two Artifacts: an Ancient Ski and a Young Rag From Norse Greenland

By Joel Berglund, former Vice Director of the Greenland National Museum & Archives

In 1997 the Greenland National Museum & Archives carried out an archaeological investigation in Kirkespirsdalen, an area of Nanortalik, the southernmost municipality of Greenland . The task was to examine some stone structures suspected to be part of a Norse dairy station. The structures were to be removed to make way for a road leading from the coastline to the future goldmine, “Nalunaq” in Kirkespirsdalen. Apart from the structures that proved to be of Norse origin, the most exciting find at the site was a worn old rag, a textile of unmistakable Norse production. The piece, 60x65mm, was later AMS-dated to AD1425 (calibrated, 1 sigma), making it one of the youngest dates from the medieval Norse settlements in southern Greenland, which were occupied from late 900 to about 1450 AD.

About a year later a piece of wood was brought to the Greenland Department at the National Museum of Denmark. According to the provenance information, the piece was found in a similar structure several kilometers further up the Kirkespirsdalen. A later visit to that location confirmed another dairy station built into the tumbledown rock scree of a mountainside, a few meters above the bottom of the valley.

The piece of wood measures 85cm x 9cm and is less than a centimeter thick. The upper side is slightly rounded and the underside is flat, and a row of small holes had been made at regular intervals along both edges. After having been stored a couple of years at the Greenland National Museum and Archives the piece was shown to the department of skis at the Umeå Museum in northern Sweden . An expert there confirmed that the piece was a fragment of a so called, “short ski” of a type illustrated in Olaus Magnus' famous book on northern Scandinavian people published in 1555. One of the identifying characteristics of this kind of ski is the foot placement at the far rear end so most of the ski is in front of the foot. The small holes along the edges were used to fasten a skin, usually a sealskin, hair side up in a way so that the hair lays flat toward the rear to prevent the ski from sliding backwards. A little piece of the ski was carefully cut out and sent for carbon-14 dating to the AMS laboratory in Aarhus , Denmark, where they determined the wood was either larch or pine and dated to approximately A.D. 1010, making it the oldest known ski in Greenland . Either the ski or the wood must have been imported, perhaps from Norway , as Greenland driftwood is unsuitable for making skis due to deterioration from salt degradation from Pholadidae, a ‘driftwood-eating' mussel.

So far, very few finds dealing with communication and travel have been found in Norse sites in Greenland . We have fragments of clinker-built Viking-style boats, some examples of boot-bottom crampons keep people from slipping on the ice, bits of sledges, and now a fragment of a ski. Since no other fragments of wood skis have been identified, ski travel was probably rare and perhaps limited to the initial phase of Norse settlement by people who used this technology in Iceland or Scandinavia.

For more information please contact us! arctics@nmnh.si.edu

"Short skis” as illustrated by Olaus Magnus, 1555.

The oldest ski in Greenland, dating to approximately A.D. 1010.