6,000 years of arrows emerge from the melting of Norwegian ice

Archaeologists in Norway have discovered dozens of arrows, some dating back 6,000 years, melting from a 60-acre patch of ice in the county’s high mountains.

Expeditions to explore the Langfonne Ice Zone in 2014 and 2016, both of which were particularly hot summers, also revealed abundant reindeer bones and antlers, suggesting that hunters have used the ice zone over millennia. Their hunting technique remained the same even though the weapons they used evolved from stone arrowheads and iron-tipped river shells.

Now the research team is revealing the findings in a paper published in the journal today Holocene. A total record of 68 full and partial arrows (and five arrowheads) was eventually discovered by the team in and around the melting zone, more than archaeologists have recovered from any other frozen site in the world. Some of the bullets date back to the Neolithic period while the most “recent” findings are from the 14th century AD

While the sheer number of historical projectiles is astounding, Langfonne’s findings are also overturning generally accepted ideas in the relatively new specialty of ice zone archeology and providing new clues about ice’s potential to preserve or destroy evidence of the past in the over thousands of years.

Since archaeologists began systematically examining ice melt sites 15 years ago, ice patches from Norway to North America have yielded almost perfectly preserved artifacts from ancient times. In isolation, the individual exhibits contain information on the crafts and hunting traditions of the past.

Langfonne, in fact, was one of the first ice sites to come to light, after a local hiker discovered a 3,300-year-old leather shoe that stood near the edge of the ice zone in the summer of 2006 and has reported to archaeologist Lars Pilø, now a researcher in the Cultural Heritage Department of the Innlandet County Council and co-author of the new study.

Since that discovery warned Pilø of the possibility of artifacts preserved in the ice areas of the mountains, researchers in Norway and beyond (there are similar sites in the Canadian Yukon, the Rocky Mountains in the United States and the Alps in Europe) have wondered whether the distribution of objects on and around the ice could tell them how and when the ice zone sites were used and how they grew over time.

Unlike glaciers, which are essentially slow-moving frozen rivers, patches of ice are fixed deposits of snow and ice that can grow and shrink over time. Sites like Langfonne, the researchers speculated, resemble a patch of snow at the end of winter: as temperatures rise, artifacts trapped inside melt in the order they were deposited.

“The idea was that ice was like a time machine. Everything that lands on it stays there and is protected, ”says Pilø.

This meant that the oldest objects would be found in the deepest core of the ice zone, in the same way that archaeologists working with artifacts buried in the ground assume that the lower layers of earth contain older artifacts. And since patches of ice were thought to grow steadily with each winter snowfall, the more recent finds would have been closer to the patch’s edges.

If the ice patches froze artifacts exactly where they were lost, archaeologists theorize, those objects could help reconstruct what people did there in the past, how large the ice patches were at specific points in prehistoric times, and how fast they are. grown and shrunk over time.

Langfonne’s arrows seemed like a way to test the time machine theory.

Reindeer arrows and bones confirmed previous suspicions that the ice patches of Norway’s high mountains were hot spots for reindeer hunting: when cold-loving creatures retreated to the ice to avoid biting insects during the summer months , people followed them with bows, arrows and hunting knives.

But after radiocarbon dating all the arrows and collecting dozens of more dates from the reindeer remains they found on the ice, the researchers realized that, at least in Langfonne, the time machine theory was unreliable. Researchers expected that the oldest objects would be trapped in place from the day they were lost and preserved, as would artifacts buried in ice in later centuries. But Langfonne’s oldest artifacts, which date back to the Neolithic, were fragmented and heavily altered, as if they had been shaken by ice or exposed to the sun and wind for years.

Arrows from later times, such as the 1,500-year-old arrow using a sharp mussel shell collected from a river at least 50 miles away, appeared to have been fired just yesterday. “This raises the suspicion that something happened inside the ice” that exposed and froze the older objects again, says Pilø.

And the arrows did not seem to emerge in any particular order, as would be expected if the ice formed perfect layers over time. Arrows made thousands of years apart lay not far from each other on the edge of the ice. “The idea of ​​finding the oldest evidence when the ice patch is smaller isn’t quite true,” says Rachel Reckin, an archaeologist at Montana State Parks who wasn’t part of the research team. “It looks like gravity and water are moving the artifacts down.”

Co-author Atle Nesje, a glaciologist at the University of Bergen, says that thousands of years ago, hot summers likely exhibited older artifacts, which were carried to the edge of the ice expanse by meltwater streams before freezing. again. The weight of the ice pressing on the lower layers could have caused them to shift, taking their frozen contents with it. Or the light wooden arrow shafts may have been blown across the surface by strong winds before getting stuck in rocks or covered in snow again. Arrows lost in the snow more recently, meanwhile, may have remained in place.

Since the old arrows could be washed out of meltwater and then refrozen, the spot where they were found may be a long way from where they originally landed. This meant that using radiocarbon dated arrows to map the size of the ice patch was a dead end in the past. “Glaciologists and ice-zone archaeologists hoped the artifacts could give us an idea of ​​size over time, but that’s not the case,” Reckin says.

The researchers were pleasantly surprised that Langfonne’s arrows, once dated, could provide useful clues as to how people have used the ice patch over time. In some periods, for example, the team found many reindeer bones but very few arrows. This suggests that people weren’t hunting on ice; instead, reindeer were likely killed by wolverines, who bury their carcasses in the snow to eat them later.

Between 600 and 1300 AD, around the Viking Age, radiocarbon dating revealed a different type of activity in the Langfonne area. “There are a lot of arrow finds, but hardly any reindeer material,” says Pilø. “It’s not a coincidence.” Humans were working hard to remove the slain reindeer from the ice, harvesting their fur and antlers to sell as a bargaining chip.

The rapidly evolving understanding of ice and the secrets it holds matches the speed at which ice is disappearing. “I have been studying Norwegian glaciers for 40 years. It’s a huge change, “says Nesje.” It’s pretty scary to see how fast the ice sheets can melt, overnight. “

Based on the growth of lichens on the rocks around the ice zone, Nesje estimates that Langfonne today is half the size it was in the late 1990s and a tenth of its extent during the Little Ice Age, a centuries-old decline in global temperatures. which lasted from about 1300 AD to 1800.

Constant melting means archaeologists need to move fast while preserving as much information as possible. “Time is of the essence, and we’re trying to be good scientists by doing our best with the data we have,” says Reckin. “Every piece of this puzzle that helps us understand the complexity of these processes is really useful.”