Melting Mountain Ice Is Bringing Ancient Secrets to the Surface. Archaeologists Are Racing to Find the Artifacts Before They're Lost to Time

This arrow with a pressure-flaked arrowhead made from gray quartzite dates to the Late Stone Age or Bronze Age and was found on Norway s ice. The pitch and the animal sinew used to fasten the arrowhead are still preserved, which is exceptionally rare. Espen Finstad, Innlandet County Municipality. 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.

“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.”