Archaeologists surveying the Svalbard archipelago this summer documented 45 stone-covered graves on elevated ground near Cape Fuglehuken, on the island of Prins Karls Forland, and the burial style does not match any funerary tradition researchers can currently attach a name to. The find comes from the 2026 field season of the Spitsbergen Archaeological Expedition, led by the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which spent the summer surveying western Spitsbergen and the northern tip of Prins Karls Forland using non-invasive methods rather than excavation.
Norwegian law bars digging up or removing artefacts at the sites the expedition studies, so the team works by documenting what is visible on the surface: grave shapes, cemetery layouts, exposed timber, and eroding coastlines. What they found at Cape Fuglehuken was a cemetery whose stone coverings do not fit the burial customs already known from Svalbard’s best-documented historic population, the Pomor hunters from Russia’s White Sea coast.
The Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences has run the Spitsbergen Archaeological Expedition for years, building a long-term survey record of Pomor hunting stations, burial grounds, and shipwreck material across the archipelago’s western coast. That record is what makes the Cape Fuglehuken cemetery stand out — the institute’s researchers are not encountering Svalbard’s historic archaeology for the first time. They know what a Pomor cemetery is supposed to look like, and this is not it.
45 graves near Cape Fuglehuken break from known Pomor practice
The 45 graves sit on elevated terrain overlooking the coast, a placement consistent with deliberate cemetery planning rather than a scattering of individual burials. HeritageDaily’s account of the expedition’s findings quotes researchers describing the stone coverings as “an unusual burial tradition when compared with known Pomor funerary practices,” which is a notable statement given how thoroughly Pomor burial sites elsewhere on Svalbard have already been catalogued over decades of survey work.
That mismatch is the whole story. A cemetery this size, in a place this remote, should belong to a population researchers can already identify. Instead it does not.
A wooden cross complicates the cemetery’s identity
Roughly a hundred feet or more from the stone graves, in the southern part of the same cemetery, the expedition found the remains of a wooden cross. Pomor hunting stations elsewhere on Svalbard are typically identified by exactly this marker, wooden Orthodox crosses erected at both settlements and burial grounds by Russian hunters who wintered on the archipelago from the early eighteenth century into the 1840s. Finding one inside a cemetery whose graves otherwise look nothing like standard Pomor burials leaves researchers with two populations’ worth of evidence in one place and no clean way to reconcile them.
The expedition has stopped short of assigning the site to any group. Researchers say the historical and cultural attribution of the cemetery has yet to be established, which is a deliberately open verdict rather than a placeholder for one that is coming soon.
Ebeltofthamna is eroding faster than the 2025 survey found
The team also returned to Ebeltofthamna, a Pomor settlement and necropolis on the northern shore of Krossfjorden consisting of three residential complexes and their associated burial grounds. Finds exposed along the site’s coastal cliff include a leaf-shaped pectoral cross, Dutch white clay smoking pipes, fragments of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ceramics, leather footwear, and iron tools, and analysis places the settlement’s founding in the late seventeenth century, with occupation continuing intermittently into the first half of the nineteenth. None of it can be legally removed, so archaeologists built detailed 3D models of the exposed material directly at the site instead.
A 2025 survey first flagged significant deterioration at Ebeltofthamna; the 2026 return found the damage accelerating. Researchers estimate the site could be lost entirely within a few decades if the coastal erosion and permafrost thaw driving the destruction continue to intensify with the broader warming trend already reshaping the Arctic coastline.
Ship timbers, a reconstructed face, and a 60-kilometre walk
Erosion at the nearby Pomor necropolis has already exposed two rows of graves and the remains of several crosses on a marine terrace, and one burial there had a partially exposed skull. Researchers used it to build a 3D model of the individual’s facial region and reconstruct an approximation of their appearance, a rare direct outcome from a survey method built around not disturbing anything. Elsewhere, the expedition logged new fragments of historic wooden vessels, including four ship keels, dowelled frame sections, and an unusual stretch of hull planking on the Sarsa Peninsula built from two boards joined with wicker rather than nails. Limited maritime transport forced the team to cover 60 kilometres on foot in a single day to reach and check the condition of the Stabbelva and Gravsjøn settlements, and at Cape Kokerineset they examined ship timbers Norwegian researchers found in 2025 and provisionally identified as Russian, material the archaeologists are now seeking permission to study further.
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This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
