Climate change has revealed huge haul of ancient arrows in Norway
An extraordinary number of arrows dating from the Stone Age to the medieval period have melted out of a single ice patch in Norway in recent years because of climate change.
Researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Oslo and Bergen gathered up a total of 68 arrow shafts, some with arrow heads still attached or nearby, and many other artifacts, newscientist.com reported.
Almost all of the items were found on an area of mountainside no bigger than 18 hectares in Jotunheimen, a region of southern Norway.
The oldest arrows date from around 4,100 BCE while the youngest are from roughly 1,300 CE, based on radiocarbon analysis. However, the dates aren’t evenly distributed across the millennia, raising questions about whether environmental conditions during some periods were more likely to preserve fallen arrows than at other times. Peaks and troughs in reindeer hunting activity could also have played a role.
In some cases, arrowheads of various materials have also survived, including bone, slate, iron, quartzite and one made of mussel shell. A few arrowheads even retain the twine and tar used to fix them to their wooden shaft.
Based on the nearly 300 specimens of reindeer antler and bone also secreted by the ice, and the fact that reindeer still frequent the area, the archeologists are confident that the area served as a key hunting ground for millennia.
Other artifacts from the site include a beautifully preserved 3,000-year-old shoe and textiles that the archeologists say may have been used to package meat.
The finds represent a “treasure trove”, said William Taylor at the University of Colorado Boulder, who wasn’t involved in the work. He noted that it is very unusual to recover so many artifacts from melting ice at one location. “You might expect a handful of items if you were lucky,” he said. “It’s extremely rare and extremely important.”
As the ice that locked the artifacts away has shifted and deformed over time, the arrows have moved from the locations where they originally fell. That makes it hard to infer too much about the activity associated with them, said Lars Holger Pilø at the Department of Cultural Heritage, Innlandet County Council, Norway, who is one of the paper’s coauthors.
“The ice is an artifact-preserver but it is also at the same time a destroyer of history,” he said.