Greenland | Heather Pringle

I sometimes think that one of the worst jobs in archaeology today would be to work as a curator at the British Museum. Yes, there is the prestige of researching and mounting massive exhibitions that attract international attention. But who would want to be on the receiving end of all the ire of foreign governments who want their treasures back, from Iran demanding the loan of the Cyrus cylinder to Greece pressuring for the return of the Parthenon marbles? And I sure wouldn’t want Zawi Hawass lecturing me on the return of the Rosetta Stone.

Now a new front has opened up in the diplomatic war to pry loose national treasures from the British Museum showcases–and it’s not at all where you might think it would be. Last week, Scottish National Party MP Angus MacNeil called for a debate in the British House of Commons over the repatriation of the very famous Lewis Chessmen discovered in a sandbank on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides Islands sometime before 1831.

First a very short primer on the Lewis Chessmen, which are my all time favorite artifacts from Medieval Europe. A 12th century artist carved the exquisitely beautiful chess pieces–93 in all–mostly from walrus ivory, which could well have come from the Greenland colonies, or possibly even from the Canadian Arctic. (That’s another story I’ll save for another day.) No one knows for certain, however, where the chessmen were carved, although some scholars lean towards Trondheim in Norway, since similar chess pieces were found there. How these wonderful chessmen–one of the best preserved sets from the medieval world- came to lie in a sand dune near Uig on the Isle of Lewis is unknown.

Shortly after they came to light in 1831, however, the Hebridean finder decided to sell them. A private buyer purchased 11 of the pieces and the rest went to the British Museum, which displays several of these miniature artworks in one of its galleries.

But now people in the Outer Hebrides want their famous chessmen back. Indeed, their MP Angus MacNeil is working hard to repatriate them to the Museum nan Eilean in Stornoway, the major town of the Outer Hebrides. And what has provoked this protest? It appears that the British Museum has stepped very clumsily on toes and local sensitivities in the Outer Hebrides. Its curators have been working on a major travelling exhibit of the chesspieces to Scotland and according to a recent online article in The Press and Journal, advertising for the forthcoming exhibit attributes the chesspieces to Norwegian craftsmen, completely ignoring the possibility that they were carved in the Outer Hebrides.

Is this just a tempest in a teapot? I don’t think so. The Lewis chesspieces are objects of of immense pride in the Outer Hebrides, and someone at the British Museum should have known this. I am becoming more and more sympathetic all the time to foreign governments and even local museums who want to repatriate their greatest treasures from the vaults and exhibition cases of the British Museum. It think it’s patronizing in the extreme today to think that only the big national museums in developed countries know how to take care of the world’s most important cultural heritage.

Serge Lebel’s discovery of small meteorites in a 200,000 year-old site in France has got me thinking once again about the critical role that other such space debris has played in human history. So I took another look last night at a wonderful paper that Robert McGhee, a former curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and one of the world’s great experts on ancient human cultures in the Arctic, wrote about the influence of the Cape York meteorite on Arctic history.

According to Danish metallurgist and meteorite expert Vagn Buchwald, the Cape York meteorite produced the largest shower ever recorded. Falling to earth in northern Greenland, the ten known fragments littered a strewnfield measuring 100 km NW-SE. The largest of the iron-rich masses weighed 30 tons, the smallest some 250 kg.

When Europeans first arrived in northern Greenland, they learned of these meteorite chunks from indigenous Inuit hunters of the region. The Inuit regularly travelled to the fragments to break off pieces of iron, which they then cold-hammered into a host of immensely valuable tools, including chisels, blades, gravers and pegs. The Cape York fragments were their sole source of iron, and they so treasured them that they gave them names such as Ahnighito, an Inuit word meaning “Tent”, and incorporated them into their mythic tales. (Ahnighito is now in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History.)

Now here is where McGhee’s ideas come into play. Archaeologists have long known that the ancestors of today’s Inuit originated much further to the west, quite likely along the coasts of the Bering Sea. But some time in the 12 century A.D., these ancestral Inuit, known as the Thule, migrated swiftly into the eastern Arctic. The big question has long been what drew them eastward so quickly? Over the years, researchers have proposed a variety of theories, from climate change (the migration coincided with the Medieval Warm Period) to sharp increases in Thule populations.

But McGhee proposed a very different theory. He suggested that the Thule hurried into the Eastern Arctic in order to lay their hands on a major source of precious iron. In all likelihood, he suggests, the Thule had earlier acquired bits of iron by trading across Bering Strait, but this would have been a drop in the bucket compared to the wealth of iron in the Cape York fragments. Moreover, it seems likely that the Thule learned about this iron source from an another Arctic culture, the Dorset, who were lightly scattered across the region. In McGhee’s view, this knowledge would have been sufficient to lure some bands eastward.

If the Canadian archaeologist is right, the course of Arctic history was altered forever by a hunger for iron, and metal from the sky.

Tag Archives: Greenland

Repatriating the Lewis Chessmen from the British Museum

Iron from the Sky