Norwegian ice patch archaeology

For several years I've been reading about and writing posts about "ice patch" archaeology - the harvesting of ancient artifacts from areas where retreating ice has exposed the surface of the ground.  Spectacular items have been recovered in the Yukon and other circumpolar countries. This week Archaeology features an extended (7-page) report on items discovered in Norway:

In Scandinavia and beyond, the booming field of glacier and ice patch archaeology represents both an opportunity and a crisis. On one hand, it exposes artifacts and sites that have been preserved in ice for millennia, offering archaeologists a chance to study them. On the other hand, from the moment the ice at such sites melts, the pressure to find, document, and conserve the exposed artifacts is tremendous. “The next 50 years will be decisive,” says Albert Hafner, an archaeologist at the University of Bern who has excavated melting sites in the Alps. “If you don’t do it now they will be lost.”..

Usually the finds amounted to little more than an arrow here or a spear there—isolated misfires lost in the snow in times past. But since that first prehistoric shoe turned up in 2006, archaeologists have found more than 1,600 artifacts in Oppland County alone, sometimes hundreds at a time. Pilö said Oppland’s finds represent more than half the total number found so far in ice patches worldwide...

The archaeologists have found hundreds of “scare sticks,” wooden stakes with flat wooden shingles attached to them by string so the shingles blow around in the wind. The sticks were planted in the snow in long rows. According to an eighteenth-century report from a Danish missionary in Greenland, the unfamiliar moving objects unsettled the reindeer just enough—without spooking them—to guide them toward stone hunting blinds, where hunters waited with bows or spears...

Moss-covered rock cairns... mark a trail across the pass that people and their livestock may have used for centuries. The team found plenty of evidence of high-mountain traffic, from that Bronze Age shoe to a Viking mitten, an elaborately carved walking stick, fragments of a ski, and copious horse and sheep dung...

It is tempting to think of all these melting sites as glaciers, and the field as “glacier archaeology,” but that is a bit of a misnomer... Ice patches, however, are stationary accumulations of snow and ice, often in isolated basins or on shady mountainsides. Centuries of snowfall accumulate and freeze, creating blocks of ice that can be 65 feet thick or more. Artifacts lost or left in the snow atop an ice patch don’t get churned as they would in a glacier...

Among the items preserved by the ice, fabric and leather are the most remarkable—and the most fragile. Wood artifacts may last a few years once they melt out of the ice, but for these items, the clock runs out much faster. “You really have to be there when the leather comes out, because it goes away very quickly,” Pilö said. “You have a week or less to recover leather—it dries out, becomes light and brittle, and blows away.”..

Much more at the link.