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Melting Mountain Ice Is Bringing Ancient Secrets to the Surface. Archaeologists Are Racing to Find the Artifacts Before They’re Lost to Time
In Norway’s highest mountains, experts are scouring perilous terrain for pieces of the past, long stored in mint condition in ice patches. As temperatures rise across the world, glacial archaeologists must find the emerging artifacts before they degrade forever
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A brown leather loafer came into view on a patch of ice high up in Norway’s Innlandet Mountains. As soon as local hiker and history buff Reidar Marstein spotted it, he knew it was significant. Marstein wrapped the shoe in paper and plastic, carried it down the slope and called a local archaeologist. That perfectly intact item, found on an exceptionally warm September day in 2006, ended up transforming an entire scientific field. It belonged to a Bronze Age Viking 3,400 years ago.
The artifact formed the basis for the largest glacial archaeology program in the world: Norway’s Secrets of the Ice. Marstein and Espen Finstad, whom Marstein had phoned that day, founded this joint research initiative with the Innlandet County Council and Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History after the shoe’s discovery. Ever since, the program’s small team of archaeologists have traversed the Innlandet Mountains when ice melt reaches its peak in August and September, scouring the terrain for more hints about the past.
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“Everything we’ve found from prehistory had to be carried up by somebody in animal-hide leather shoes. They were quite rugged, because they didn’t have a choice. It was just another day for them,” says Julian Post-Melbye, a glacial archaeologist with the program and the Museum of Cultural History. Now, he adds, it’s humbling “to do fieldwork in lightweight gear and Gore-Tex—everything money can buy to make walking around in the mountains easier.”
Secrets of the Ice’s archaeologists have collected about 4,500 artifacts so far. Among them are the world’s oldest intact pair of wooden skis; a 3,000-year-old Viking arrowhead shot by a reindeer hunter in the Bronze Age; and textiles, traps and tunics lost along ancient trade routes. The program earned two European Heritage Awards last year for excellence in conservation, research, education and citizen engagement around the world.
In August, Post-Melbye showed me one of the day’s discoveries in a back room of the Norwegian Mountain Center, a museum in the village of Lom that shelters about 100 of the program’s finds at the foot of some of the country’s highest peaks. From a small zip-lock bag, he extracted a brittle section of a basket used by Vikings to carry game. The team has been piecing the leather weavings together like a puzzle for a few years now. As quickly as he set the thin strips of leather down, they began to crumble.
Ice pauses the process of decay. By keeping organic material, such as wood and textiles, at a consistent, low temperature without oxygen, it slows microbial activity that could otherwise decompose the items in months. While glaciers, which constantly move, will ultimately crush objects stored inside them, adjacent slow-melting stationary mounds of ice, called ice patches, can preserve artifacts in mint condition for thousands of years. When these historical items emerge from frozen landscapes, however, they’re no longer protected and are vulnerable to weather and decay.
Today, as climate change accelerates ice melt at an unprecedented rate across the globe—from the Alps to the Rockies to the Altai Mountains—glacial archaeologists are racing to find resurfacing artifacts. Working under pressure and with limited resources, they’re on a high-stakes scavenger hunt to dig up the remains before they’re forever lost to a warming world.
“There are so many chapters of the human story preserved in rare and rapidly melting mountain ice, and so few of these areas have been properly investigated,” says William Taylor, curator of archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, who has been excavating in Mongolia since 2011. “I fear that most of mountain Asia has been so poorly documented in terms of glaciers and ice patches, and ice melt is proceeding so quickly, that most of the incredible cultural heritage and scientific knowledge stored within will be gone within a handful of years.”
For now, working with genealogists, historians, wildlife researchers, reindeer herders, local hikers and mountain people, the world’s glacial archaeologists are piecing together an ancient puzzle that will help us understand how mountain life has changed across millennia.
An archaeological race against time
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Revealing ancient secrets is no simple task. “You need to be willing and able to walk in the mountains and have the archaeological experience to retrieve and document,” explains Post-Melbye. Surveying ice patches takes strategic planning, patience and expertise in archaeology, mapping, preservation and glaciers—not to mention the physical strength and skill of a mountaineer.
Deciphering what life looked like for hunters and traders traversing with their animals through elevated pastures thousands of years ago is getting even harder as time runs out and high-mountain ground grows less stable. “I fell down in a crevasse last year with no safety equipment on,” Post-Melbye says. “Somebody had to climb in and get me out. Another colleague was hit by a rock fall, and he’s okay, but as ice patches melt, they get steeper, and the permafrost around them—from rock that’s been there for up to 8,000 years—is giving out.”
The Stockholm Environment Institute reported last year that by 2030, the world is expected to more than double the fossil fuel production outlined under the Paris agreement. In Norway alone, up to 80 percent of mountain ice is projected to disappear by the end of the century, and that’s if greenhouse gas emissions were to miraculously stop now.
“For the last 15 years, I can see that from some of our most important sites in Norway, half the ice has disappeared,” Post-Melbye says. “Projections for what will happen to the Norwegian ice tells us that they will be gone in my lifetime.” And the ice patches, he adds, will disappear before the glaciers do: “I don’t think there will be many ice patches left in the next 20 years.”
Exposure to oxygen has already biodegraded many artifacts melting out of ice patches in northern Mongolia, leaving questions unanswered about how humans and animals adapted to climate changes thousands of years ago. So Taylor has spent the past few years turning toward the country’s highest peaks in the west instead. “Now we are seeing the same thing happen in the Altai Mountains—and in my home state of Montana, it’s the same story,” Taylor says. “The window is closing to learn what we can from these incredible archaeological ‘deep freezers’—and our opportunities for funding have been hit very hard in the last year.”
A young and uncertain field
For a field with such a precarious future, glacial archaeology is relatively new. Post-Melbye remembers the birth of the discipline in 1991, after the discovery of Ötzi the Iceman. A German couple hiking on the border of Austria and Italy came across what they thought was a recently deceased mountaineer but turned out to be the 5,300-year-old prehistoric man. Other artifacts had occasionally been discovered sitting out in the open on melting ice since around 1914, when an arrow was found on a Norwegian ice patch, but Ötzi catalyzed the search for remains.
Quick fact: A big year for glacial archaeology
Unusually warm weather in 2006 drew many artifacts from the ice of Norway’s Innlandet Mountains. Archaeologists found arrows, arrowheads, textiles and other items, though the “most remarkable” may have been the leather shoe picked up by Reidar Marstein.
As global temperatures continued to rise, urgent, systematic “digs” began across the world. The discipline developed formal research protocols in the 1990s and 2000s, as survey, documentation and conservation programs were established in places like the Canadian Yukon and Alaska. In 1999, an expedition team in the remote Andes co-led by Constanza Ceruti—the first woman high-altitude archaeologist—discovered the world’s oldest mummies, known as the Children of Llullaillaco. These three kids of the Incan Empire, who’d been entombed, drugged and ritualistically sacrificed around 1500 C.E., were found sitting perfectly preserved after being freeze-dried in zero humidity near the top of a volcano, 22,100 feet above sea level, at the highest archaeological site in the world.
Over the past 15 years, researchers’ databases of reference material from uncovered artifacts has grown, and the amount of organic DNA needed to analyze samples has shrunk. Next-generation DNA sequencing technology revolutionized the field around 2010, making entire ancient genomes more accessible. This technique can analyze ancient DNA to reveal details about the ancestry, disease and migration of long-gone animals, plants and people. Artifacts discovered by Secrets of the Ice undergo this DNA analysis, and their age is established through carbon dating. Then, the real detective work begins.
Post-Melbye’s team looks within the emerging remains for clues about the lives and environments of ancient humans and their animals. It can be a painstakingly detailed process, he says. “What pollen was on the horses, and what have they eaten? What parasites did they have, based on perfectly preserved manure?” asks Post-Melbye. From the glue of birch bark pitch, chewed by humans to make it more pliable for tools, other archaeologists have traced human DNA back to the Stone Age. Secrets of the Ice does a lot of this filling in the blanks of the growing Norwegian archaeological record, which allows them to breathe new life into the past.
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Glacial archaeology is preparing to enter its acme in the coming decades, as archaeologists organize excavations throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas, even in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. But despite recent technological advances, the field lacks the necessary investment and manpower to identify, retrieve and document the objects and biological material emerging from ice patches in many regions of the world. “This means that there is a massive dead-weight loss to science happening amidst all of the contemporary whiplash from ice melt and other environmental challenges,” Taylor says.
Time melts away
A 45-minute drive from the artifacts on display in Lom, up winding roads in Jotunheimen National Park on Norway’s highest mountain, an ice tunnel cuts through a 7,600-year-old ice patch—the oldest dated ice on mainland Norway. Stand inside, and the reason that residents of Lom pride themselves on their archaeology program becomes crystal clear. Two years after the original hand-carved tunnel melted, Post-Melbye explains, locals in 2012 worked for weeks to chisel this roughly 60-meter-long glacial grotto, called Klimapark 2469, determined to draw visitors to inland Norway.
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At the site chosen for the original ice cave, the Secrets of the Ice team had discovered spears, shafts and scaring sticks used by the Lom villagers’ Iron Age ancestors to herd wild reindeer. As visitors walk through the ice cave, designed by Norwegian ice artist Peder Istad, they encounter Norse mythology-inspired ice sculptures and replicas of the archaeology program’s artifacts.
“People here could trace their roots back through ancient DNA. Some of the farms have been in the same family as long as the written record in our 900-year-old church,” says Post-Melbye. “Based on where the mountain passes cross, we can also make educated guesses about which of the remaining farms here now would have used that route the most.”
One of the program’s oldest objects, on display at Lom’s Mountain Center, is a shaft of a 6,000-year-old arrowhead from the Stone Age. But the large majority—now displayed at Oslo’s expanding Museum of Cultural History—have been linked to the late Roman Period (roughly 753 B.C.E. to 476 C.E.), explains Post-Melbye. A Roman sandal that the archaeologists found, for example, changed their understanding of high-mountain trade routes, which they once believed were impassable by humans.
“There are more artifacts found in Norway than anywhere. There may be steeper terrain and more glaciers in places like the Alps, but the conditions here are ideal to protect them,” says Rune Strand Ødegård, an engineer at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who studies glaciology of the ice patches for Secrets of the Ice and oversees Klimapark 2469. “We need to collect and understand as much as possible in the time window we have in the coming decades before the glaciers from this area are gone and everything is lost.”
The problem, however, is that, depending on their condition and material, the artifacts can disintegrate almost as quickly as they’re found. Sinew and textiles are extremely fragile in harsh weather, and Secrets of the Ice has only a small team of five archaeologists working against a backlog of objects emerging from 70 sites.
This urgency is glacial archaeology’s biggest challenge—but it’s also the reason the field, which may come and go in a single century, exists at all.
“As the mountain landscape is changing before my eyes, I realize it has fallen upon my generation of archaeologists to secure the achievements and histories of our ancestors in the high mountains,” Post-Melbye says. “If we don’t do it now, we will never get the chance again.”