Stone age artifacts including weapons, shoes, walking sticks and mittens -- abandoned in the mountains of Norway many thousands of years ago -- are being revealed as mountain glaciers melt and retreat, researchers say.
When those artifacts were lost or dropped around 7,000 years in the past, the region was experiencing a warmer climate, and now global warming is revealing objects of daily life as glaciers and ice fields in Southern Norway have begun melting again, they say.
In the past two decades scientists "have witnessed artifacts turning up in summer from increasingly deeper layers of the glaciers," says archaeologist Lars Pilø, who has spend many years among the glaciers and ice doing field work to discover artifacts belonging to our ancestors.
The summer of 2014 yielded a bumper crop of objects, as Pilø and his colleagues discovered around 400 artifacts including a horse skull and hiking staffs dating to the Viking Age.
They also found an arrow shaft from the even earlier Stone Age.
One of the glaciers where the researchers conducted their search lies next to an ancient route across the mountains used by ancient peoples to move livestock, or to go back and forth to their summer farms.
"We often find things associated with hunting," Pilø says. "There are also ordinary objects such as mittens and shoes and the skeletons of horses that died on the trek across the mountains. This makes it a real thrill."
Similar artifacts from ancient mountain-dwelling peoples have been found in the Alps, the Andes and the Rocky Mountains in the U.S., the researchers note.
Rapid melting of glaciers has archaeologists scrambling to gather them and preserve them in the state that thousands of years encased in ice has left them.
In Norway's Oppland County alone, where Pilø and his fellow researchers have been working, around 2,000 artifacts have melted out of the ice, revealing abundant information about people living in the region as long ago as the Stone Age.
Doing fieldwork among melting glaciers and ice and snow patches has become a new field of specialization for archaeologists, and was the subject of a recent article in the journal Science.
Since November 2014 the field has had its own publication, the Journal of Glacial Archaeology, and glacial specialists have begun to hold their own conferences.
