bove 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.
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