Greenland Norse walrus exploitation deep into the Arctic

Walrus ivory was a prized commodity in medieval Europe and was supplied by Norse hunters who expanded across the North Atlantic, establishing settlements in Iceland and Greenland. However, the precise sources of the ivory remain unclear, as well as the extent to which Norse hunted walrus or traded ivory with Arctic Indigenous peoples. We use high-resolution genomic sourcing methods to track walrus artefacts back to specific hunting grounds, demonstrating for the first time that Norse obtained ivory from the High Arctic region of the North Water Polynya, and possibly from the interior Canadian Arctic. This substantially expands the previously assumed geographic range of Norse exploitation activities, confirming likely encounters with Tuniit (Late Dorset Pre-Inuit) and Thule Inuit, as well as possible emergence of ivory exchange.

Methods
The biological samples (n=100) were obtained from an appropriate range of geographic locations and chronological intervals from different museum collections. Following Ruiz-Puerta et al. 2023, samples were extracted and sequenced in delicate ancient labs at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen. The 31 Mitogenome data from walrus ivory artefacts were obtained from Star et al. 2018 and Barret et al. 2022 and added to the Bayesian phylogenetic analysis.  All raw DNA sequence data was mapped to a walrus reference mitogenome (NCBI accession: NC_004029.2) using the PALEOMIX (v1.2.13.4) BAM pipeline.