Preliminary Assessment Report of the Archaeofauna from KNK 203 (E 74), a Norse Farm in the Eastern Settlement, Greenland

This is an interim working report of analysis in progress on the animal bone collection (archaeofauna) from the Norse farm E74 KNK 203 excavated in the summer of 2006 ahead of flooding by hydroelectric dam construction. The archaeofauna is still under study, and this report presents only a partial overview of the collection. However, a number of observations can be made at this stage:

The collection has been subject to severe attrition from freeze-thaw cycling and repeated flooding and drying. Only the most dense bone elements survive, and even teeth are badly preserved in some contexts.
While the conditions of preservation will limit the comparative value of the E74 archaeofauna and will probably make a detailed context by context analysis impractical, the collection does have considerable value as a fully sieved archaeofauna from a small inland farm. With care, some broad conclusions about economy can probably be reasonably made.
These include:
- Seals were of major importance in all phases at E74, despite its inland location. As in other E Settlement archaeofauna, harp seals and hooded seals are the most common, but a few harbor seal bones have been identified.
- Walrus bones (both post-canine teeth and maxilla fragments from tusk extraction) are present in the E74 collection, probably indicating participation by household members in the distant arctic Norðursetur hunt.
- Sea birds (murre or guillemot) were also consumed at E74, further re-enforcing the marine connections of this inland farm.
- Cattle bone is present, but sheep and goat seem to have been substantially more important at the site. This is a pattern duplicated on other smaller farms known from prior excavations. While smaller farms were apparently more reliant upon sheep and goat herding, they were not complete specialists, and kept a full range of domestic stock.

Archaeofauna cattle Eastern Settlement Greenland KNK 203 (E 74) sea birds seals walrus zooarchaeology

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