slate on top

In normal archaeology you dig down to reach the old thing. In Norway’s mountains the old thing is lying on the surface, and that fact is the measurement.

Norway’s glacial archaeology programme in Innlandet spent three weeks this season working the ice patches of the Kvitingskjølen area in Jotunheimen — Langfonne, Storfonne, Handklefonne — and came off the mountain with 48 prehistoric arrows. The oldest is somewhere between five and six thousand years old: a slate point, a wooden shaft, and sinew and birch bark still wrapped around the nock.

Twenty years of this work has produced 73 sites and more than five thousand artefacts. And in the programme’s own telling, something has changed about what the ice is handing over.

When they started in 2006, most of what melted out was less than two thousand years old, with the Viking Age heavily represented. Now most of it is older than two thousand years, and a lot of it is Stone Age and Bronze Age.

That shift is not a change in method or luck. It is a readout. An ice patch is layered, oldest at the bottom, and for twenty years the melt has been eating down through it. Finding Viking arrows means you are into the upper strata. Finding slate points means the bottom is exposed. The age of what you pick up tells you how much ice is left, and right now it is telling you there isn’t much. The programme says the ice on many of these sites may be gone entirely within twenty years.

So the find and the loss are the same event. The arrow is visible because its preservation has ended. There is no reading of this archive that is not also the last reading.

And it is worse than that, on a shorter clock. The things that make these finds extraordinary are the organic parts — the shaft, the sinew, the bark — and those survived only because they were sealed in ice and nothing happened to them. Once an arrow is lying in meltwater and sunlight, the clock that stopped six thousand years ago starts again, and wood and sinew do not last long in the open. The work is not excavation. It is interception.

Here is the part I find hard to put down. On hot days reindeer leave their grazing and go up onto the ice to get away from the insects. The hunters knew it and followed them there, and the programme’s own estimate is that they shot from no more than ten or twenty metres.

Follow that through. An arrow that hit went home with the animal. What stayed in the snow is, mostly, what missed.

Which means the archive is made largely of failure. Five thousand objects, most of them a bad afternoon — a shot taken a little too far out, a shaft that went wide, a hunter walking back down the mountain with one fewer arrow and nothing to show. Nobody intended to leave anything. The record exists because the snow was deep and nobody wanted to spend the rest of the day looking.

Six thousand years later it comes back up for one summer, and somebody is standing there to catch it.

Sources: Year of the arrows — now the Stone Age is melting out, Secrets of the Ice ↗ · Scaring sticks — the thin line between life and death for reindeer, Secrets of the Ice ↗ · 5,000-year-old arrow emerges as Norway’s melting mountain ice reveals older archaeological finds, Archaeology Magazine ↗ · Prehistoric traces found frozen in Norway’s Jotunheimen mountains, HeritageDaily ↗