Melting Norwegian Ice Reveals 6,000-Year-Old Arrows

For 20 years, a team of archaeologists has walked the edges of ancient ice patches in the Norwegian mountains, watching them retreat and collecting whatever the melt reveals. This year, what emerged left them more unsettled than excited.

Two Decades at the Edge of the Ice

Since 2006, the glacial archaeology program Secrets of the Ice has worked the mountains of Innlandet, in eastern Norway, recovering artifacts exposed as ancient ice patches melt. Until recently, most finds dated back no more than 2,000 years, with a large share coming from the Viking Age. The ice itself has acted as an extraordinary preservative, keeping organic materials like wood, leather, and textiles intact for centuries in ways that would be impossible almost anywhere else. Over the years, the team has recovered clothing, footwear, the remains of pack horses, and even a matched pair of ancient skis found several years apart.

The Oldest Ice Is Going First

That pattern is now shifting. As the most ancient ice begins to melt, it’s exposing material far older than anything the team has typically recovered. This year’s fieldwork, concentrated in the Kvittingskjølen mountain area at sites called Langfonne, Storefonne, and Hanklefonne, turned up an unusually large haul: 48 prehistoric arrows in a single season. According to Espen Finstad, who leads Secrets of the Ice, that find brings the running total recovered from just one of these ice patches to more than 100 arrowheads and shafts.

Six Thousand Years in a Single Arrow

One of this year’s most significant finds is an arrow with both its head and shaft made of slate. By comparing it with similar arrows found previously, the team estimates its age at somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 years old, placing it firmly in the Stone Age. Other arrowheads recovered over the years have been fashioned from bone and even freshwater mussel shell, materials tied to the Bronze Age, roughly 3,600 years old. By contrast, the most recent arrowheads the team finds are made of iron and are comparatively young, dating to only 1,000 to 1,500 years ago. Taken together, the range illustrates thousands of years of continuous reindeer hunting at these same high-altitude locations.

A Discovery Shadowed by Loss

Finstad has always described the work of glacial archaeology as carrying a built-in tension. “It’s fun going around looking for things,” he said. “It’s exciting, and finding something is just really cool.” But that excitement sits directly alongside the reality driving these discoveries in the first place: climate change is melting the ice that has preserved these artifacts for thousands of years. Finstad pointed to this year’s landslide in Nepal and a glacier collapse in Jotunheimen as recent, visible signs of that same broader pattern. “We have always acknowledged this contradiction and the reality behind our work,” he said. “But this is the first time it has truly affected us on an emotional level.”

“Now It’s Giving Up”

Finstad described this year’s fieldwork as carrying a much deeper sense of seriousness and sadness than in previous seasons. Ice patches that were once substantial have shrunk down to small, steep remnants, a visible and sudden change in landscape the team wasn’t fully prepared for emotionally, even after two decades of this work. “There has been ice here for 6,000 to 7,000 years,” Finstad said. “Nature has been warning us and sending signals for many years. But now it’s giving up. Now it is simply going to melt.” In a press release accompanying the discoveries, the team’s own archaeologists wrote that they have been at the edge of the ice and seen it happening, describing themselves as witnesses to a rapidly changing archaeological landscape.

A Closing Window

Finstad and his colleagues estimate that most of the ice patches currently holding archaeological material will have disappeared entirely within the next 20 years. That timeline effectively sets a deadline on this entire category of research: once the ice is gone, so is its unique capacity to preserve organic material that would otherwise have rotted away millennia ago. Several of this year’s finds have already gone on display at the Norwegian Mountain Centre in Lom, just days after their recovery, and the team is continuing fieldwork in the weeks ahead, weather permitting, racing to document and recover what remains before it’s lost for good.

Sources

This report draws on original reporting by Ida Irene Bergstrom for Science Norway, and a press release from Secrets of the Ice, the glacial archaeology program of Innlandet County Municipality.