Archive Note
The mummies, six women and two children, were found in October 1972 by the brothers Hans and Jokum Gronvold near the abandoned settlement of Qilakitsoq in the Uummannaq Fjord, preserved by cold, wind, and desiccation rather than intentional mummification and radiocarbon-dated to about 1475 CE, the late Thule period. In the early 1980s researchers using infrared photography, which sees carbon pigment under darkened tissue, identified facial tattoos, blue-black lines arching over the eyebrows and along the nose and chin, on five of the six adult women; the youngest adult woman was untattooed, read as consistent with tattooing as a life-stage marker. The find is pre-contact proof of the circumpolar Inuit kakiniit tradition and was published in The Greenland Mummies in 1991. The remains are held at the Greenland National Museum and Archives in Nuuk.