In the Jotunheimen mountains of southern Norway, melting ice is unexpectedly revealing traces of a distant past: archaeologists have recovered 48 prehistoric arrows, one of which dates back roughly five to six thousand years.
The find was made in the Kvityngskjolen area on the Langfonne, Storfonne and Handklefonnen glaciers. Among the artifacts is a slate arrowhead with fragments of a wooden shaft and traces of ancient bindings made of birch bark and resin. Such details rarely survive in ordinary soil, but the ice reliably protected them from decay.
The Secrets of the Ice program of Innlandet has been excavating for twenty years now. In that time, researchers have documented 73 sites and collected more than five thousand objects: arrows, bows, clothing, footwear and even the remains of pack horses. Previously, finds younger than two thousand years predominated, including those from the Viking period. Now artifacts from the Stone and Bronze Ages are appearing ever more often.
The shift in the age of the finds points to the melting of the most ancient layers of ice. When the ice retreats, organic materials — wood, leather, sinew — end up on the surface and quickly decay. Archaeologists note: what the ice preserved for millennia is now disappearing within a few decades.
Most of the arrows are connected with reindeer hunting. Ancient hunters used the mountain passes as the animals' migration routes. Slate arrowheads, along with those of bone and freshwater mollusk shell, give way to iron ones, but the fastening technique remains astonishingly enduring.
This year the field season is still ongoing. Some of the finds are already on display in a cooled case at the Norwegian Mountain Center in Lom — visitors see the objects literally a few days after they are taken from the ice. Researchers emphasize: the time to save the artifacts is limited.
Over two decades of observation, the picture has become clear: the old ice is vanishing, and with it a unique opportunity to read pages of history that otherwise would never have seen the light.
Each new season brings ever more evidence of how people adapted to harsh mountain conditions over millennia, using the ice as a natural refrigerator for their tools and traces of everyday life.
