Mountain glaciers are retreating due to global warming. Surprisingly, this creates a boon for archaeology. Incredibly well preserved and rare artefacts emerge from melting glaciers and ice patches in North America, the Alps and Scandinavia. A new archaeological field has opened up – glacial archaeology. The archaeological finds from the ice show that humans utilised the high mountains more intensely than previously known – for hunting, transhumance and travelling. New important discoveries appear each year, as the ice continues to melt back.
As glacial archaeologists, our dream discovery is a site where an ancient high mountain trail crossed non-moving ice. On such sites, past travellers left behind lots of artefacts, frozen in time by the ice. These artefacts can tell us when people travelled, when travel was at its most intense, why people travelled across the mountains and even who the travellers were. This information has great historical value.
There are several glaciated mountain passes in the Alps where incredible discoveries have emerged from the ice. Remember Ötzi? Here in Norway, almost all of our ice sites contain remains from reindeer hunting. However, would it be possible to find a glaciated mountain pass here with all its potential treasures? The hunt was on.
Fieldwork at Lendbreen Starts
August 4th 2011, the year of the big melt. We were surveying at 1900 m, along the upper edge of the Lendbreen ice patch. It was no coincidence that we were working here. In the 1970s and 1980s, local mountain hikers reported several artefacts from this site to the archaeological authorities, including a completely preserved Viking Age spear.
Viking Age spear, originally found in one piece in front of the Lendbreen ice patch. Photo: Vegard Vike, Museum of Cultural History.
Previous days of survey led to the discovery of the usual arrows and scaring sticks, which showed that reindeer hunters were active here during the Iron Age. On this day, however, we started finding bits of textile, leather and other artefacts that are not common on hunting sites. What was going on?
The Discovery
While most of the crew started documenting the finds, two team members went ahead. It was a foggy day, and the fog just got denser as they progressed. Suddenly, they stumbled upon a strange wooden object. It looked like a giant slingshot, more than a metre long.
Then the fog lifted, and a large and shallow depression in the ridge appeared. When we were here the year before, snow and ice had filled the depression. The warm summer of 2011 had melted all of this, and exposed the bare ground in the process. As the two team members progressed into the depression, they had to be careful where they put their feet. Artefacts and horse dung were everywhere.
Ancient horse dung found in the depression at the top of the Lendbreen ice patch. Photo: secretsoftheice.com.
One of the two team members got his mobile phone out of his inner pocket and called the documentation team. He had to focus to keep his voice steady: “Guys, pack up your equipment and meet us in basecamp. We need to talk.”
We had hit the mother lode.
Rescuing the Artefacts
There were a lot of excited archaeologists in basecamp that evening. It was an incredible discovery, but we knew we had to act fast. Snow can arrive at any time in the high mountains, burying all the artefacts beyond our reach. In the following days we worked from dawn to dusk to document and collect the many artefacts in the depression before winter snow arrived. Thanks to a great effort by the team, we were able to complete the work in time.
Members of the Secrets of the Ice team packing finds in the Lendbreen pass. Photo: Johan Wildhagen, Palookaville.
It turned out that this frantic fieldwork was only the beginning. The Lendbreen ice patch continued to melt in the years that followed and more artefacts emerged from the ice. We have undertaken fieldwork at the site from 2011 to 2015 and again in 2018, 2019 and 2023, each time collecting many finds.
Systematic survey at the Lendbreen ice patch, showing the rough terrain that makes survey difficult. Photo: Johan Wildhagen, Palookaville.
The survey at Lendbreen now covers c. 250,000 square metres, which equals 35 football fields, except that these football fields are on a 30-degree slope and the playing field is a combination of loose scree, bedrock and ice. To our knowledge, this is the largest glacial archaeology survey ever conducted.
The weather in the high mountains can be challenging for archaeological fieldwork. Lendbreen basecamp in August 2013. Photo: secretsoftheice.com.
It has been a demanding fieldwork in often appalling weather conditions. However, the reward has made it all worthwhile. The results from the fieldwork have made it clear that we have indeed discovered a lost mountain pass – the dream site for glacial archaeologists.
The Lost Mountain Pass
The lost mountain pass at Lendbreen is an incredible archaeological site. It has yielded hundreds of finds from ancient travellers, including clothing, dead packhorses and remains of sleds from the period AD 300-1500. It also has preserved cairns marking the route, and even a stone-built shelter in the pass area.
We knew from oral history that local people had crossed the Lomseggen ridge (c. 1900 m) through three known passes en route to or from their summer farms. Remarkably, the glaciated pass at Lendbreen is not among the known passes, even though finds and structures clearly show that it must once have served the same purpose.
Farms in Skjåk, north of the Lomseggen ridge, crossed the ridge to get to their summer farms at Neto (lower left corner). Three passes were known from oral history, but not the Lendbreen pass. Map: Lars Pilø, secretsoftheice.com.
Archaeological Ice Sites are Different
Before we dig into the details of the Lendbreen site, it is useful to know that archaeological ice sites in the high mountains are quite different from regular archaeological sites in the lowlands. There is a lot of artefact displacement by meltwater, ice movement and wind, blurring the original patterns of distribution. Simply put: We only rarely find artefacts where they were originally lost. At Lendbreen, four pieces of the same Bronze Age ski fitted nicely together. However, their find spots were up to 250 metres apart. Thus, caution is necessary when we try to interpret the artefact patterns.
The Lendbreen ice patch with find spots for parts of the same ski in red. When the route was used, Lendbreen was considerably larger than it is today. The pass is situated at the low-point of the ridge. Illustration: Lars Pilø, secretsoftheice.com.
Packhorses used the route crossing Lendbreen when snow covered the rough terrain. Thus, the artefacts were very likely originally lost or discarded on snow. However, until the big melt in 2019, nearly all the finds recovered in the pass area lay on the ground. This is in fact quite normal on archaeological ice sites. The artefacts melted out one or more times since their time of loss on the snow and ended up on the ground, only to be re-covered by snow and ice (read more about ice patches and glaciers as archaeological sites here). Finding the artefacts on the bare ground today does not mean that they were originally lost when the area was free of snow and ice. Misunderstanding this fundamental issue was what got the Ötzi investigation off on the wrong foot (read here).
The Preservation of Artefacts
The glacial ice preserves artefacts of organic materials, such as wood, bone, wool and leather. Wood, birch bark and bone preserve best of these. They are often the only materials left on sites that are repeatedly exposed. Textiles and leather disappear more rapidly. This means that we must be careful not to over-interpret maps of artifact distribution. Differences in preservation may cause some of the patterns. One example of this is the clear concentration of artefacts and horse dung in the depression just below the pass. This is likely the result of good preservation conditions there.
One of the larger lichen-grown cairns, marking where the route originally started crossing the ice. The cairn has a standing stone, which is now close to falling. The light-colored rocks in the background were covered with snow and ice until recently. Photo: James Barrett, University of Cambridge.
The Cairns and the Shelter
Luckily, artefacts are not the only objects that show where the route crossed the ice. A line of cairns shows the route coming up the Lendbreen ice patch from the north and going down on the southern side. In the pass area, there is a large number of cairns of varying sizes and shapes and even a stone-built shelter.
The ruins of a stone-built shelter in the pass, measuring 5×3 m. The light-coloured scree to the right shows the maximum extent of the ice patch prior to the meltback. Photo. Espen Finstad, secretsoftheice.com.
Other routes crossing the Lomseggen ridge do not have nearly the same amount of cairns and Lendbreen is the only one with a shelter. This singles out Lendbreen as a pass of special significance. You get the impression that maybe not all of the travellers here were locals. Therefore the route needed better markings and to be provided with extra protection. The high number of large and small cairns in the pass does remind one of the cairns built by tourists today, as memorials of their visits.
Map of the cairns and the horse remains showing the route crossing the Lendbreen ice patch. Map: Lars Pilø, secretsoftheice.com.
The Packhorses
Along the line of cairns, we have found bones of packhorses that died during the crossing of the ice. The earliest of these bones dates to the 5th-6th century AD. Lendbreen is an ice patch without crevasses, so we can rule out falling into a crevasse as a cause of death for the packhorses. The trip over the pass was quite short, so lack of fodder is also out. More likely, the packhorses suffered a fall and a broken leg or they died from exhaustion (read more about high mountain pack animals here).
The cranium of an unlucky packhorse that did not make it across the ice. Photo: Espen Finstad, secretsoftheice.com.
There are also a number of horseshoe finds. The iron horseshoes are heavy and do not displace as easily as the light organic finds. Together with the cairns, they are a secure pin-pointer to where the route crossed the ice.
Horseshoe from the 11thto mid-13thcentury AD, found at Lendbreen in 2018. It even has a piece of the hoof still attached to it on the other side. Photo: Espen Finstad, secretsoftheice.com.
The Horse Dung
In the pass area where preservation conditions are better, there are thousands of pieces of horse dung. Radiocarbon dates of this dung have yielded Late Iron Age and Medieval dates. There is actually so much dung in the pass area that the ice has a brownish colour in some places. There must have been many horses going through the pass.
Aerial photo of a section of the pass area showing the brown ice caused by horse dung. Screenshot from video by Jan Benkholt.
The route crossing Lendbreen seems to have worked in an opposite way to mountain passes in the Alps and in the Himalayas. In these mountains, glacier advances often closed passes during climatic cold periods. In contrast, the route crossing Lendbreen would only have allowed horses to pass during periods with snow covering the rough ground.
The Sled Remains
Before we started fieldwork at Lendbreen, we heard a local story about the discovery of a sled there in the 1960s. There are a number of such stories of fantastic discoveries from the ice in our county (including one about a mammoth, which absolutely cannot be true), and we did not put too much faith in it. We checked the area, where the sled was supposed to have melted out but had no luck.
The fieldwork in the pass area has shown, however, that there may be some truth to the story. The giant slingshot-like object found in the pass, together with a similar piece, is what is known locally as a “tong”. They were used to secure the load on sleds carrying fodder (read more here).
The ”tong” first found by the two team members in the mountain pass at Lendbreen. Scale is 50 cm. Photo: secretsoftheice.com.
Leaf Fodder
Incredibly, we may even have found remains of such fodder. We recovered more than 60 cut branches from the site, mainly in the pass area where preservation conditions are good. Specialists have examined them. Their analysis shows that the branches probably are the remains of leaf fodder. This is not a trivial question, as transporting leaf fodder on sleds or on packhorses at nearly 2000 metres during wintertime must surely have been a daunting task. We have radiocarbon-dated five samples of the leaf fodder, which cover the period AD 700-1400.
A piece of leaf fodder, found in the Lendbreen pass. Radiocarbon-dated to c. AD 1100. Photo: secretsoftheice.com.
Other finds point to transport as well. There are a number of finds of withy locks, wooden plugs and other artefacts, which were likely used for securing the loads on packhorses or on sleds. As such artefacts are rarely preserved in other contexts, their exact function remain somewhat uncertain.
