Qajartalik

A hundred and fifty stone faces left by a people who vanished from the Arctic

On Qikertaaluk Island in Nunavut, about 40 kilometres southeast of Kangiqsujuaq in Arctic Quebec, more than 150 faces look out of a trough of soapstone 130 metres long, 15 metres above the sea: the northernmost rock art known in North America, and one of a kind. They were carved by the Dorset, the people who lived across the eastern Arctic and Greenland from about 2,200 years ago and disappeared about 1,000 years ago, before the Thule Inuit arrived. Most are human faces, some are animal, and some are both at once; they run from two centimetres across to more than 70, some alone, others in crowds of ten or more turned every which way. The Dorset quarried the soapstone for lamps and containers, and the Thule and Inuit quarried it after them, but only the Dorset carved faces. The site has never been scientifically dated. Inuit hunters knew it for decades before an anthropologist recorded it in the 1960s. Vandals damaged it in 2006, and it is on Canada’s tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage.