HANSEN, Keld, 2008 Nuussuarmiut - Hunting Families on the Big Headland. Demography, Subsistence and Material Culture in Nuussuaq, Upernavik, Northwest Greenland, Copenhagen, Meddelelser om Grønland, Man and Society, 35, 239 pages.

The author Keld Hansen is a museum curator and editor of the journal Gronland. At the time he wrote this book, he was employed by the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde (1988-2003). Prior to that, he worked at the Greenland National Museum (1984-88) and the National Museum in Copenhagen (1964-1976). This publication stems from his earliest appointment in Copenhagen, during which he conducted ethnological fieldwork among the Nuussuarmiut in Upernavik District on the northwest coast of Greenland. The book features the material culture of this community, focusing on their subsistence strategies, and presents demographic information as it pertains to the 20^th century. Hansen spent one year (from summer 1966 to fall 1967) working at the Upernavik Museum and learning about the material culture of the local communities. During the summer of 1967, he also conducted archaeological excavations in the region. The book under review is mostly about his ethnological fieldwork, which he conducted among 18 families from Nuussuaq between October 1967 and November 1968. Hansen was invited as an apprentice hunter in the community and learned how to make and use their hunting technology. Consequently, the book is mainly about material culture, and presents complete descriptions and detailed drawings of tools and hunting equipment, along with explanations on how to use them in a technological and social context. Throughout the chapters, Hansen also adds various hunting statistics and demographic data in order to situate his field notes in a wider temporal framework. Hansen’s goal is to assess the community’s adaptation to the arrival of European materials, technology, and ways of life, and to explore the negotiation of their ancestral traditions with these “modern” elements. The book is divided into 12 chapters and five appendices. The introduction presents the fieldwork context and methods used to gather the data. Chapter One features Upernavik District, its geographic location, and the history of the various people who lived there (the local communities, the Norse, the Dutch, the English, and the Scottish). He discusses the relationships between the local communities of Upernavik and the Europeans, focusing mostly on their trading dynamics. Some statistics about population, hunting, and climate are presented for various periods of the 20th century. Chapter Two is about the Nuussuaq community itself, one of about a dozen settlements in Upernavik. Hansen presents a short history of the settlement (established in 1923), as well as population and hunting statistics and information about the local climate. Chapter Three explores the ecosystem in the surrounding area, with an emphasis on game animals, based on the knowledge and observation of local hunters. For each species, Hansen comments on their place in the diet of the Nuussuarmiut, their social value (for the hunters’ prestige), their role in trading relationships with Europeans, along with the animals’ behavioural and biological patterns, and the harvesting methods and technology. Hansen provides a comparative list of Greenlandic, Danish, and English names for all the game animals, emphasising the differences between Greenlandic and European classifications of species. Additional information is given about the most useful local plants, with elaborate drawings by the author. Chapter Four describes the annual cycle of the Nuussuarmiut. Every month of the year is reviewed in terms of climatic and ice conditions, daily activities in the settlement, and hunting activities and their outcomes. Chapter Five is about materials and tools, and briefly discusses the choice and distribution of materials in manufacturing the most common tools. The following chapter is about transportation. Hansen discusses the manufacture, design, and use of the sledge, the umiaq, the kayak, motorboats, and their respective equipment (harpoons and firearms). It is the central …