MUN Archaeology Lecture: Bjarne Grønnow

Another very interesting public archaeology talk is coming to Memorial University this Monday.  Bjarne Grønnow, a Danish archaeologist working on Palaeoeskimo sites in Greenland, will be talking about some of the amazingly preserved Saqqaq sites in Disko Bay.  One of the sites,  Qeqertasussuk, is a site that I reference frequently in my work.  I've made reproductions of some of the baleen wrapped knives found there and human hair from the site allowed scientists to sequence a Palaeoeskimo genome.

Bjarne excavating

That's all cool, but really I'm excited because Bjarne is a super nice guy.  In 1994, he accompanied a University of Calgary archaeology project to Little Cornwallis Island that I worked on as a student.  I recall one horrible windy day where work was called off because of the terrible weather.  Four of us sat huddled in one tiny Logan tent that was snapping like a drum around us.  It was too loud to hear or think and we were several kilometres away from the main camp.  We were feeling pretty low, until we heard a rustling at the tent flap and Bjarne's beaming face, followed by a bottle of schnapps, poked inside.  He drove a quad from the main camp in weather that wasn't fit to be in just to pop in for a chat and to share a nip of schnapps.

PROFESSOR BJARNE GRØNNOW

Danish National Museum, Copenhagen

will give a talk

At Close Quarters with the Arctic Pioneers: News from the Frozen Saqqaq Sites in Disko Bay, West Greenland

MONDAY, APRIL 16

Department of Archaeology

Queens College, MUN, St. John's

ROOM 2013

4:00 pm

ALL WELCOME 

Photo Credits: 

1: John Lee from Naturens Verden 1988

2: Photo cropped from the McDougall Sound Archaeological Research Project virtual slide show