Dr. Asta Mønsted

And what is really interesting about this is that all of those three elements, so the throat, the nostrils, and the eyes,

they are all three placed on the front wall of the house.

So you don't have eyes in the back of the house.

You have all of it in the front wall.

So the house actually has a face.

And that face was oftentimes facing the ocean.

And the ocean in Greenlandic worldview is

oftentimes where you get your food from.

You get your food from marine animals.

You can also hunt musk ox and reindeer, but you oftentimes get food from the sea.

And we also find it linguistically in how you would communicate where you would go.

So if I asked you, where are you going for hunting?

And you're going to tell me, I'm going to go west along the coast.

And in order to understand that, I need to have that compass of yours as well.

So I need to have my back against the inland ice.

I need to have my nose and my eyes towards the sea.

So when you tell me, I'm going to go west along the coast, if we are in West Greenland, that means you're going south.

And if you are in East Greenland, you are going north.

So it's sort of before we have north, south, west, east, you have this inner compass that is also more or less depicted in the houses.

We don't have this in numbers, but when I have talked to colleagues of mine, we sort of agree that many of the houses, they are facing the ocean.