Dr. Asta Mønsted

You needed to train on your skills, but you also needed to treat the animals and the rest of nature with respect.

So when you would go out hunting for whale, for example, the whale was quite picky in a way or, you know, it likes fine things, the whale.

So you need to put on your best suit or if you can, a newly, a new suit.

set of clothing when you go hunting for it to pay its respect for that hunting animal and to attract the animal to you.

So there is something about you, what you put into the world is going to come back to you, right?

In a way, it really is.

It really is.

We have stories.

I mean, because they are stories that were handed over from generation to generation, they could be hundreds of years old.

And within archaeology, we like to date things, but it is difficult to date stories, right?

Especially when they needed to be handed over for decades and decades and never be changed, for example.

But in...

When the colonizers came then, the missionaries in 1721, they started to write down or make some notes on some of these stories that they had heard from the local people.

And today, when we look at those sources, we need to sort of peel it just like an onion because they write down, I have heard this story.

ridiculous story told by the locals, of course.

So we need to take away the layers to find out what did the locals actually tell them from that time.

So already from 1735, we have stories being written down about what the locals were telling each other and what they believed.

And then we have all the way up until 1981, those stories were recorded.

So today we have a database containing 2,280 stories that were all collected over that time span of 250 years.

And of course, the question for us is, is there anything missing?