A few years ago, the Greenland National Museum found and registered a very special ancient structure on the blue route between Sermermiut and Holms Bakke.
The structure is currently believed to be a Greenlandic Dorset tent ring with a middle passage. If this is true it could be anywhere between 2,000 and 2,700 years old. But to be sure of the age of the structure, further archaeological investigations need to be performed.
If this tent ring is from the Greenlandic Dorset culture, it raises some interesting questions for us—the most important being, why do we find it so high in the terrain up here on the mountain? Typically, these types of structures would lie closer to the beach. No doubt similar tent rings could be found down at Sermermiut where they would lie under several meters of soil, where they would have been placed close to the ancient shoreline.
Here the tent ring is in an extremely exposed location. Additionally, we can also see that no other people came later and settled in this spot or tried to build a camp here. This humble tent ring has remained undisturbed and may ultimately provide us with a unique insight into the behaviors of Stone Age cultures in Greenland.
In the middle passage of the structure there is a box hearth that would have provided light, heat and fire for cooking. The exterior surrounding stones of the tent ring would have held animal skins in place, providing a cover or roof for the structure. It must have been very close to what we would describe as a “tent” - but we don't know exactly how it was constructed. There must, for example, have been some kind of opening or flue in the roof to pull the smoke out of the tent.
It will be exciting to have archaeological investigations performed on the structure in the future. These types of investigations may provide us with stone flakes or some organic material for radiocarbon dating of the structure’s age. When we have more certainty about the structure’s age and the people who built it, we will update this section.
On the way to stop number 11 you will pass a mountain landscape with ancient Inuit graves. Stop number 11 will not be at a physical stop but you can listen to it, and learn about the graves whenever you like.
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