Trade was the main motivation for the cultural meeting between European whalers, merchants and missionaries and the Inuit of the Historic Thule Culture. The aim of this project is to study the spread and cultural adoption of European trade-goods in order to study the nature of the cultural meeting between Europeans and Inuit in 17th, 18th and 19th century Greenland. The focal point is an archaeological analysis of the reworking of European trade-goods and their context of deposition as means to decipher the cultural biographies and social histories of European artefacts. The project compares three geographical areas with varying degree of access to European trade-goods/traders: Two in Western Greenland and one in Eastern Greenland. The purpose of the comparative approach is to shed light on, how the varying degree of access to European artefacts and different patterns of trade affected the range of trade-goods and the social meaning of the foreign artefacts in the Historic Thule culture. 

Coordinator: Peter Andreas Toft