After a closer look at the ice near the Iron Age arrow shaft, we also found the arrowhead! Now we have a complete 1500-year-old arrow from this site. Great stuff (1/5) The arrowhead as it lay on the ice (2/5)

Lendbreen, August 4th 2011. We discovered a large piece of textile in a hollow in the scree, close to the melting ice. On closer inspection, a diamond twill pattern emerged. Little did we know at the time how incredible this find really was. Maybe just as well, or our hands would have been trembling when we lifted the find and packed it for transport...

This strange artifact melted out of the ice in the Lendbreen pass. We scratched our heads to try to figure out what it had been used for but we couldn't come up with a good answer. The object was exhibited at the local museum. A visiting elderly woman solved the mystery for us. She had used such objects on a local farm in the 1930s!😮 She told us that it is a bit for young animals, mainly goat kids and lambs, to stop them from getting milk from their mothers.

In a new paper published today in The Holocene, we re-examine the famous Ötzi find. The results of our analysis has profound consequences both for the history of the find and for the use of Ötzi as a climate indicator 1/18
secretsoftheice.com/news/2022/11/0… Ötzi, a 5300-year-old ice mummy, was discovered in 1991 in a gully in the Tisenjoch pass in the Tyrolean Alps. The mummy and the associated finds is possibly the best-studied archaeological find ever 2/18
(First photo of Ötzi. Copyright Erika Simon)

Surveying around ice patches is not quite the same as surveying in cultivated fields in the lowlands. In addition, the sites are huge and need to be surveyed meticulously as artefacts are otherwiseeasily missed in the scree. A lot of effort is made but the rewards can be great❤️ This picture gives you an impression of the vast size of the site. The light-coloured scree has been exposed by ice retreat in the last 20-25 years. The lichen-free zone, as we call it, covers around 300000 square meters on this site, so there is a lot of ground to cover.

This is why we ❤️ glacial archaeology! See how happy we are when we get to hold an arrow, which has been lost in the ice for 1500 years We discovered the arrow between stones in the scree. It was found near the lower edge of the ice but was probably lost in the snow further up the slope. When it later melted out, it was transported downslope by meltwater, and ended up on the ground where we found it.

All set! We hike up to the first site tomorrow morning.
The site we are targeting is an ice patch in the Jotunheimen Mountains used for reindeer hunting. The first arrow (Viking Age) was discovered there in 2007. In 2019, the ice patch was hit by a major melt and some really well-preserved arrows melted out. The earliest arrow is now dated to the Stone Age (photo). We still have a lot of unsurveyed ground on the site, so let's go!🙂

BREAKING NEWS! We have just made an incredible discovery at the Digervarden ice patch, Norway. We have found the best-preserved prehistoric pair of skis in the world! 1300 years old and both have the bindings preserved. The second of the two skis has just come out of the ice❤️ Back in 2014, the Secrets of the Ice program found an exceptional pre-Viking ski, 1300 years old, at the Digervarden Ice patch. The ski was complete, including the binding – one of only two skis from prehistory in this condition.

Thread: As the high mountain ice melts back, archaeological finds from the ice become older and older. The earliest archaeological finds from the ice in Norway are now five fragmented arrowshafts dating back to 4000 BC (one in picture). How old can the finds get? /1 Is it possible that future melting could reveal archaeological finds that date back to the last Ice Age, as envisaged in this prophetic cartoon by Gary Larsson? Could we find remains of Ice age hunters at the bottom of the ice? /2