Aasivissuit–Nipisat

Inside the Arctic Circle in West Greenland, a strip of land about 235 km long, from Nipisat Island in the Davis Strait to the ice sheet, holds 4,200 years of human history. The first people were the Saqqaq, who lived in the region from around 2000 BCE until at least 700 BCE. The Nipisat site was found in 1989 by Finn Kramer of the Sisimiut Museum, and excavation in 1989–1994 recovered over 70,000 animal bone fragments and about 1,000 artefacts.

The later Thule people came from northern Canada around 1100, and their earliest artefacts here date to about 1250. They hunted marine mammals and fished from stone winter houses on the coast, then moved inland in summer to hunt caribou. At the eastern end, Aasivissuit was a summer camp from the 15th to the 19th century, with 22 tent sites, meat caches and a 3.9 km caribou drive, the largest in Greenland.

In 1723 the missionary Hans Egede found people hunting large whales at Nipisat, and a trading station was set up there. In 1728 King Frederick IV of Denmark ordered a fort built on the island, then had it abandoned two years later. The landscape, with seven key localities, was inscribed on 30 June 2018.