Abstract

For six weeks in 2004, a crew of seven from Greenland, Denmark, and the US, surveyed two areas on the central coast of Inglefield Land, Northwestern Greenland: Force Bay and Marshall Bay. This region provides an excellent location for examining the complex interaction of climatic change (end of the Little Ice Age), culture contact (between Inughuit and British whalers, Inuit from Baffin Island, and American polar explorers), and the affects on local technology and subsistence. We relied mainly on intensive foot-based survey and identified and mapped nearly 800 archaeological features. Virtually everywhere we looked that could support human occupation had evidence of past use including nearly 300 tent rings, 16 semi-subterranean winter houses, and a wide variety of other feature types such as meat caches, fox traps, hare snare lines, kayak and umiak stands, and human burials. One of the highlights of our summer was a site at Cape Grinnell, located at the northern end of Force Bay, where at this one single locality we encountered evidence of habitation dating from recent times to at least 4000 years ago and documented over 100 features representing nearly every type known in the High Arctic. We also believe this site was initially visited by Elisha Kent Kane in the 1850s.