The Treasures of the Lendbreen Ice Patch

Between around 200 and 1500 AD, there was a path across a Norwegian ridge at a place called Lendbreen. It was marked by cairns like the one above.

Then the route was abandoned, perhaps because of the cooling associated with the Little Age, but perhaps because trade shifted to some other place.

For the past twenty years a patch of ice in the pass has been melting, and archaeologists have been going up every summer to search for artifacts emerging from cold storage.

The most spectacular find was this linen shirt, recovered in 2011 and since then minutely studied. It dates to around 300 AD. (video here)

But there have been hundreds of other items. Like this distaff.

A horse snowshoe

A needle

A whisk (held upside-down)

A hide shoe

A bit. The humbling thing about all of this for an archaeologist is that hardly anything found in the pass was made of stone or ceramic, and very little was metal. What survives in the ground on the average archaeological site is such a tiny fragment of what people once owned and used.