A Grooved Stone of Over 30 kg From a Norwegian Quarry May Be the World’s Oldest Anchor, if Confirmed

Archaeologists raised a stone with a groove running all the way around it from waste at a Stone Age quarry off the coast of Western Norway. The stone weighs more than 30 kg, and the researchers think it may be an anchor more than 5,000 years old. If peer review confirms that, it would be the oldest known anchor in Norway, and possibly in the world, according to ScienceNorway.

A stone on a waste heap, 20 meters down

The find comes from Hespriholmen, a small island about five kilometers out in the open sea off Western Norway. Archaeologists discovered the greenstone quarry there in 1923. The stone lay at about 20 meters depth, on top of the waste heap from the islet’s largest quarry. Researchers first spotted it last year and later raised it with a rope. It is too heavy to have served as a fishing net sinker.

The investigation is led by Arild Skjæveland Vivås of the Stavanger Maritime Museum and Leif Inge Åstveit of the University Museum of Bergen.

How old is it, and how do researchers know?

The article describes no dating method. The age comes from context: the stone lay in waste from an Early Stone Age quarry, and quarrying there took place between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago. The oldest reliably dated stone anchors known so far come from the Bronze Age and were found in the Mediterranean.

Why some caution remains

Åstveit is fully convinced that the stone is an anchor, because of where it lay in the quarry waste. Vivås says the find must be published and peer-reviewed before anyone can state anything for certain. Hein Bjerck of NTNU, who did not take part in the work and has seen only photos, thinks it is probably a Stone Age anchor. He notes that Stone Age boats normally did not carry anchors, and he argues that collecting greenstone offshore would have required a way to hold boats in place.

What else the island shows

Researchers also found large hammerstones around the islet, made of a heavy rock that people brought from the mainland. Norway has no preserved boats from this period, and Åstveit believes people used skin boats, though a raft is also possible. A 1987 estimate put the extracted greenstone at about 430 cubic meters, and the team believes the true amount is considerably higher.

Source: ScienceNorway, 12 October 2026 (Ida Irene Bergstrøm). Photo credit: E. Samuelsen / Bergen Maritime Museum.