Norway’s shrinking mountain ice gave up 48 arrows this season, and about half the ice at those sites is gone

The latest field season in Norway’s highest mountains recovered 48 prehistoric arrows from melting ice, and the oldest of them are between 5,000 and 6,000 years old. Researchers say that at some of the sites they have followed for 15 years, about half of the ice has already gone.

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The arrows came out of ice patches that kept wood, leather and feathers intact for millennia and are now shrinking fast enough that finds can be lost within days of surfacing. Archaeologists describe a race between the sun and the survey team.

Forty-eight arrows from a single season

The count comes from the Secrets of the Ice programme, which ran the season and, according to a HeritageDaily report drawing on the Polish news agency PAP, also lifted clothing, tools, everyday objects and children’s toys from old mountain routes. The 48 arrows are this season’s haul only, not a running total, and the 5,000 to 6,000 year range applies to the oldest of them rather than to all of them. Until recently, most artefacts released by Norway’s melting ice dated to the Viking Age or the two thousand years before it, so material from the Stone Age is a step back in time.

Earlier seasons give a sense of the scale. A 2014 survey of the Langfonne ice patch recovered 22 arrows in a single week, and radiocarbon dating showed five of them to be about 6,000 years old, according to the programme’s own account of that season in Innlandet. A study of the same patch reported in Smithsonian magazine counted 68 arrow shafts, some with bone, slate, iron or mussel-shell heads.

The wider record shows how long people used these passes. ScienceNorway’s reporting on the programme describes finds spanning the Stone Age to the plague years of the 1300s, with artefacts at the Lendbreen mountain pass in Jotunheimen peaking in the Viking Age, roughly 1,000 years ago. About 800 objects have come from Lendbreen alone, among them sleds, clothing, a knife and a mitten. Archaeologist Lars Pilø called the lost pass “the greatest discovery of the Secrets of the Ice program.”

Reindeer, insects and the arrows that missed

The reason arrows end up in ice is the behaviour of the animals they were aimed at. In warm summers reindeer climb onto snow and ice to escape biting insects and to cool down, and Stone Age hunters positioned themselves where the herds gathered. An arrow that missed sank into the snow, and later snowfall sealed it in. The finds do not mean the sites were ice-free when people visited; the ice patches were largely undisturbed for thousands of years, which is the reason the objects survived.

Separate survey work reported by ScienceNorway shows how the same hunting landscape looks on the ground. At Sandgrovskaret, a site at 1,800 to 1,900 metres in Innlandet county, surveyors found 40 stone hunting blinds, five arrows and 32 “scaring sticks” used to drive reindeer toward the shooters. The programme monitors 65 sites across Jotunheimen, Dovrefjell and Breheimen.

Half the ice gone and a two-decade deadline

The loss is the story behind the finds. At some of the sites studied over 15 years, about half of the ice has disappeared, and many ice patches that contain archaeological material could vanish completely within two decades. The figure describes the surveyed sites and not Norway as a whole. Organic material that stayed preserved in permafrost-like conditions decays quickly once it is exposed to air, rain and sun.

Meltwater and gravity complicate the picture. Archaeologist Rachel Reckin, who was not part of the Langfonne study, cautioned in the Smithsonian report that objects move as ice retreats, so items are not necessarily found in the order they were lost. The same article said the Langfonne patch had fallen to less than 30 percent of its size two decades earlier and had split into three. For field teams the practical consequence is timing: Espen Finstad, another archaeologist with the programme, described the working window as running from August until the snow falls.

A broader measure points the same way. The ScienceNorway piece, published in 2022, cited a recent mapping showing that Norway’s glaciers had shrunk by about 14 percent over six years, and noted that many smaller ice patches had nearly disappeared. Small patches matter most to archaeologists because they thaw first, and they are the ones most likely to hold a lost arrow shaft, or a scrap of leather.

Julian Robert Post-Melbye, an archaeologist at the University of Oslo, said that textbooks on the prehistory of the Norwegian mountains will have to be rewritten. At an altitude of 2,000 metres, he said, the team has only days, maybe weeks, to secure finds once they emerge. “The choice is: do it now or never do it,” he said.

Post-Melbye also acknowledged hopes of something more dramatic. Researchers would like to find a body comparable to Otzi, the roughly 5,000-year-old natural mummy found in the Alps in 1991, and he said it is possible. That would take a person who died on the ice, was never recovered and was sealed in quickly by ice and snow. The programme keeps a public presence on its Facebook page, where field results are shared.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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