Was Erik the Red’s Brattahlið Located at Qinngua? A Dissenting View

The location of Eric the Red’s farmstead of Brattahlið in Greenland’s Eastern Settlement has long been debated. Following investigations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was later concluded that it lay in the modern settlement of Qassiarsuk. A contrary view has been propounded by Ole Guldager who has suggested that a Norse ruin group at Qinngua, at the top of Eiriksfjorðr (Tunulliarfik fjord), is a more likely location. This paper presents new palaeoenvironmental evidence involving pollen analysis and landscape history, together with a consideration of settlement structure culminating in the excavation of a putative church site, and suggests that wherever Eric’s farm was located, it was probably not at Qinngua.