Horse's Bridle Recovered From Norway's Glacial Ice
Monday, September 25, 2023
Horse’s Bridle Recovered From Norway’s Glacial Ice
Norway Horse Bridle (Espen Finstad, secretsoftheice.com)
INNLANDET COUNTY, NORWAY—Science Norway reports that a metal horse’s bit and pieces of a leather bridle have been found near the Lendbreen pass on Galdhøpiggen, Norway’s tallest mountain. This mountain pass, reaching more than 6,500 feet above sea level, is known to have been in use for more than 1,200 years. Glacial archaeologist Espen Finstad of Secrets of the Ice said that the shape of the bridle suggests it dates to the Viking Age. “We have never made such a discovery before,” Finstad said. “It essentially completes the picture that this is an ancient travel route.” The date of the bridle will be confirmed with radiocarbon dating of the leather. Horse manure, textiles, horseshoes, and part of a horse snowshoe have also been recovered from the mountain pass. To read more about ancient artifacts that have emerged from ice patches and glaciers, go to "Letter from Norway: The Big Melt."
More:
https://www.archaeology.org/news/11763-230925-norway-horse-bridle
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Treasure Trove of Artifacts Illustrates Life in a Lost Viking Mountain Pass
Lendbreen, a pass high in the Norwegian mountains, was an important route from the Roman era until the late Middle Ages
Megan Gannon
Archaeology Correspondent
April 15, 2020
Artifacts from the Lendbreen site Pilo et. al.
Above the treeline and accessible only by a tough hike or helicopter ride, the Lendbreen ice patch in Norway’s Jotunheim Mountains, about 200 miles northwest of Oslo, is a prohibitively remote place. But a thousand years ago, long before good roads were built in the valleys, this rugged mountain pass was an artery of Viking Age traffic.
During 2011’s particularly warm summer, archaeologists surveying Lendbreen for the first time found centuries-old horse dung littered all over the ground and ancient artifacts melting out of the ice. Among those early finds was a 1700-year-old tunic, the oldest piece of clothing ever discovered in Norway and one that is puzzlingly complete, perhaps tossed off by a traveler in the delirious late stages of hypothermia.
Now, after several more explorations of the site, researchers have discovered more than 1,000 artifacts including scraps of wool clothing and leather shoes, fragments of sleds, horseshoes and walking sticks. A new analysis of artifacts from the ice patch, published today in the journal Antiquity, offers new information about how this mountain pass was used over time—and some ominous clues about why it was eventually abandoned.
Lendbreen has provided the most archaeological finds of any ice patch in Scandinavia and possibly the world. While most other ice-patch sites in northern Europe were hunting sites, Lendbreen was a place for travelers. Farmers, herders and merchants came through here to cross the 6,300-foot-tall Lomseggen mountain ridge to reach local high-altitude summer pastures and perhaps trading posts and other destinations much further away.
This new research led by Lars Holger Pilø, co-director of the Glacier Archaeology Program in Norway’s Innlandet County, looked at the radiocarbon dates of 60 items collected at Lendbreen. Their results showed that the pass was used from the Roman Iron Age—a time around 300 A.D. when the Romans had increasing influence in northern Europe, although their empire did not extend to modern-day Norway—through the Middle Ages.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lendbreen-norway-viking-mountain-pass-180974680/