Video: Arrow treasure and 6,000-year-old shoe found in mountain of ice in Norway

Scientists find treasure trove of ancient artifacts in a patch of ice Norway that climate change has exposed, according to an article published on the portal Ice cream secrets by one of the authors of the discovery.

The site is the ice sheet of Langfonne, in the Jotunheimen mountains, where the first settlers hunted. This is where archaeologist Reidar Marstein found a shoe in 2006. It was believed the shoe could be as old as Viking times, but when tested for radiocarbon it turned out to be much older. old: it was 3300 years old. Beginning of the Bronze Age. This discovery came as a real surprise and started fieldwork in several places, including Langfonne, where they started working in 2014 and then 2016.

Yesterday all the results were published in the scientific journal The Holocene. On the side of a mountain in the Jotunheimen massif, in the south of the Scandinavian country, archaeologists found a total of 68 arrows, some with arrowheads still attached, in addition to the reindeer shoes, textiles and bones.

The discovery represents a record the number of pieces partial and complete found in a frozen depot. According to radiocarbon dating, the oldest arrows date from around 4100 BC. C. and the most recent, from 1300 d. vs.

The patches or spots are fixed deposits of snow and ice which provide information on how the ancient inhabitants of these areas lived and hunted and leave data on the extent of the ice at different periods of time. “The idea was that ice cream is like a time machine. Everything that lands there stays there and is protected, ”he explains. Lars Pilø, co-author of the study.

However, further analysis of the arrows revealed that the ice was melting and frozen several times over the millennia, moving arrows from their original locations. Also, it meant that older artefacts were not preserved as well as newer ones.

Neolithic arrows were broken and worn, suggesting that they have been exposed to elements such as sun, water, and wind on several occasions, while the 14th century arrows “they seemed to have been fired yesterday”Pilø commented.