Comer's Midden (nonfiction)

Thule Greenlanders whaling. 18th century drawing by Hans Egede.

Comer's Midden was a 1916 archaeological excavation site near Thule (modern Qaanaaq), north of Mt. Dundas in North Star Bay in northern Greenland. It is the find after which the Thule culture was named.

The site was first excavated in 1916 by whaling Captain George Comer, ice master of the Crocker Land Expedition's relief team, and of members of Knud Rasmussen's Second Danish Thule Expedition who were in the area charting the North Greenland coast.

With his ship ice-bound, Comer made use of his time through an archaeological excavation just south of Arctic Station of Thule unearthing, amongst other things, a kitchen-midden made by paleo-Eskimos.

The site is named in honor of Comer and the midden that he found.

In Mathiasen's monumental works of the 1920s and 1930s, he described Comer's Midden as "the only substantial find of pure Thule culture in Greenland".

Subsequent to the initial finds, additional artifacts pertain to the Dorset culture, as well as items of Norse origin.

Fiction cross-reference

• Comer's Midden Monster

Nonfiction cross-reference

External links:

• Comer's Midden @ Wikipedia
• Midden @ Wikipedia