I am in my office. The phone rings. I answer the call. It is Elling on a bad cellphone line. All I can hear are bits of excited words, with shouts of joy in the background. Then the line clears: “There are hundreds of them. Hundreds!” The field crew had found a new site with a large number …
How do glacial archaeologists know the dating of artefacts found in the ice? There are a number of dating techniques available to archaeologists. We use two main dating techniques in glacier archaeology – typological dating (the shape of the artefact) and radiocarbon dating. Typological dating Typological dating used to be the only available absolute …
We are back at the office in Lillehammer after a week of great fieldwork at our favourite site in Jotunheimen. This site just never ceases to amaze us. The number of arrows recovered here is simply staggering. This must be a world record for ice sites! The first arrows were found here in 2006, but there was …
We just got excited texts from the field! They have found what appears to be the remains of an ancient wooden sledge. The discovery was made not far from where the 1300 year old ski was found two years ago. It is broken into pieces, but maybe it is possible to put it back together …
An interesting project on the reconstruction of the Lendbreen tunic was undertaken in 2015, directed by Marianne Vedeler at the Museum of Cultural History. The reconstruction of the tunic demonstrated that the processes involved in making such a tunic are very time-consuming. The tunic must have been an item of high value. A short video …
The archaeologists working with the frozen past have their own journal called “Journal of Glacial Archaeology”. It was published for the first time in 2014, and contained papers on e.g. Bronze Age Arrows from Oppdal, Norway and inca mummies from mountaintops in the Andes. The second volume is out now. Here we can find interesting papers from Norway, Switzerland …