Melting ice reveals a lost Viking-era pass and ancient artifacts in Norway

Years of warm weather have melted most of the snow and ice, revealing a mountain route that regular humans walked for over 1,000 years—and then abandoned some 500 years ago.

The mountains northwest of Oslo are among Europe’s highest, and they are snow-covered all year. Norwegians refer to them as Jotunheimen, which translates as “home of the jötnar,” or Norse mythological giants.

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Wooden bit for goat kids and lambs to prevent them suckling their mother, because the milk was
processed for human consumption. It was found in the pass area at Lendbreen in Norway and made from juniper. Such bits were used locally until the 1930s, but this specimen is radiocarbon-dated to the 11th century A.D. © Espen Finstad

However, years of warm weather have melted most of the snow and ice, revealing a mountain route that regular humans walked for over 1,000 years—and then abandoned some 500 years ago.

Archaeologists digging along the old high-altitude road have uncovered hundreds of items indicating that it was used to traverse a mountain range from the late Roman Iron Age to the mediaeval period.

But it fell into disuse, perhaps because of worsening weather and economic changes—with the latter possibly brought about by the devastating plague of the mid-1300s.

Researchers say the pass, which crosses the Lendbreen ice patch near the alpine village of Lom, was once a cold-weather route for farmers, hunters, travelers and traders. It was mainly used in late winter and early summer, when several feet of snow covered the rough terrain.

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Possible stylus made of birchwood. It was found in the Lendbreen pass area and radiocarbon-dated to about A.D. 1100. © Espen Finstad

A few modern roads go through neighboring mountain valleys, but the winter pathway over Lendbreen had been forgotten. The four-mile route, which reaches an altitude of more than 6,000 feet, is now marked only by ancient cairns, piles of reindeer antlers and bones, and the foundations of a stone shelter.

An artifact found in 2011 led to the lost path’s rediscovery, and research published on Wednesday in Antiquity details its unique archaeology.

Years of combing the pass’s ice and snow have uncovered more than 800 artifacts, including shoes, pieces of rope, parts of an ancient wooden ski, arrows, a knife, horseshoes, horse bones and a broken walking stick with a runic inscription thought to say “Owned by Joar”—a Nordic name. “The travelers lost or discarded a wide variety of objects, so you never know what you are going to find,” says archaeologist Lars Pilø, co-director of the Secrets of the Ice Glacier Archaeology Program, a collaboration between Norway’s Innlandet County Council and the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History. Some of these items, such as a Viking mitten and the remains of an ancient sled, have not been found anywhere else.

Many of them look as if they were lost only a short time ago. “The glacial ice works like a time machine, preserving the objects over centuries or millennia,” Pilø says. These items include Norway’s oldest garment: an astonishingly well-preserved woolen tunic made during the late Roman Iron Age. “I keep wondering what happened to the owner,” Pilø adds. “Is he still inside the ice?”

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Snowshoe for a horse found during the 2019 fieldwork at Lendbreen. It has not yet been radiocarbon-dated. © Espen Finstad

About 60 artifacts have been radiocarbon dated, showing the Lendbreen pass was widely used from at least A.D. 300. “It probably served as both an artery for long-distance travel and for local travel between permanent farms in the valleys to summer farms higher in the mountains, where livestock grazed for part of the year,” says University of Cambridge archaeologist James Barrett, a co-author of the research.

The researchers believe that foot and packhorse traffic via the pass peaked about A.D. 1000, during the Viking Age, when mobility and trade were at their apex in Europe. Mountain items such as furs and reindeer pelts may have been popular with distant buyers, while dairy products such as butter or winter feed for cattle may have been exchanged for local use.

However, the pass became less popular in the centuries that followed, possibly due to economic and environmental changes. The Little Ice Age was one of them, a cooling phase that may have exacerbated the weather and brought more snow in the early 1300s.

Another factor could have been the Black Death, a plague that killed tens of millions of people in the middle of the same century. “The pandemics inflicted a heavy toll on the local population. And when the area eventually recovered, things had changed,” Pilø says. “The Lendbreen pass went out of use and was forgotten.”

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Tinderbox found on the surface of the ice at Lendbreen during the 2019 fieldwork. It has not yet been radiocarbon-dated. © Espen Finstad

Glacial archaeologist James Dixon of the University of New Mexico, who was not involved in the new research, is struck by evidence of animal herding found at the Lendbreen pass, such as the wooden tongs apparently used to hold fodder on a sled or wagon. “Most ice-patch sites document hunting activities and don’t contain these types of artifacts,” he says.

Such pastoral objects hint at the links between Norway’s alpine regions and the rest of northern Europe during times of economic and ecological changes, he adds.

Recent decades of warming weather have exposed hidden archaeology in many mountain and subpolar regions, from Europe’s Alps and Greenland to South America’s Andes. Barrett notes there is only limited time before artifacts exposed by the melting ice start to decay in the light and wind. “The Lendbreen pass has probably now revealed most of its finds, but other sites are still melting or even only now being discovered,” he says. “The challenge will be to rescue all of this archaeology.”