Wooden artifacts once used by ancient reindeer hunters have been discovered in a mountainous region of Scandinavia.
The objects, known as "scaring stick" flags, were found in Breheimen National Park, Norway, by a team—consisting of two archaeologists and a mountain guide—with Secrets of the Ice, which specializes in the archaeology of glaciers and ice patches, a post on X announced.
The team spotted the artifacts during an exploratory survey of an area where a large ice patch—essentially, a small non-moving glacier frozen to the ground—has melted back significantly and split up into smaller ice and snow patches, Secrets of the Ice co-director Lars Holger Pilø told Newsweek. Pilø is also affiliated with the Innlandet County Council Department of Cultural Heritage.
"This ice retreat is caused by climate change and affects mountain ice everywhere here in Innlandet County, Norway—and of course globally as well," the researcher said.
The place where the scaring stick flags were located is in a mountain range where a few previous discoveries have been made, among them an arrow (from A.D. 300-600) and an Iron Age or medieval wooden spade.
The scaring stick flags, which represent the first artifact finds of the year for Secrets of the Ice, are believed to be roughly 1,500 years old. The team found one complete flag and a broken one around 65 feet away.
"We just completed our first survey of the year in Breheimen National Park. We were thrilled to find a complete scaring stick flag and a broken one... as well!" Secrets of the Ice said in the X post.
Scaring sticks are long wooden sticks—generally measuring around 3 feet in length—that have light, movable objects attached to the top, for example, a thin wooden flag. They were used by ancient people in Norway to hunt reindeer and were invaluable pieces of equipment. Similar objects also appear to have been used in other circumpolar regions, such as Greenland and Siberia—although seemingly not in North America.
"Scaring sticks are used to lead the reindeer towards hunters hiding behind natural features such as boulders or behind stone-built hunting blinds," Pilø told Newsweek. "Scaring sticks come in different types, but the main idea is that they consist of a wooden stick with a movable object attached to the top. The attached object would move in the wind, which made the reindeer uneasy, as this is way above the tree-line and movement here meant danger. They were set up in lines."
Secrets of the Ice has dated many scaring sticks and they generally belong to the period A.D. 200-1000. The type of scaring stick with wooden flags made from thin, split pine—like the recently discovered examples—seem to belong to the period A.D. 300-600, which is the Early Iron Age in Norway.
"Scaring sticks are very concrete evidence for where reindeer were hunted during the Iron Age, and for the extent of the hunt—so they are valuable historic evidence," Pilø said.
Ice patches are small and react quickly to changes in weather and climate. Therefore, finds that were once lost on the ice often melt out again. They are then transported downslope by meltwater and wind and end up on the ground in front of the ice, as occurred with the recently discovered artifacts, according to Pilø.
"When this happened is difficult to say. It may have been just after they were lost, sometime later or in the last decades when the ice has retreated markedly. We sometimes discover finds on the ice surface but that is normally only during big melts, when the melting reaches ice layers previously untouched by melting, with the finds still inside the ice," Pilø said.
The retreat of ice in the high mountains of the region is not a linear process, according to the researcher.
"It is more like the retreat of the Arctic sea ice—some years are up, some years are down, but the trend is clearly down," Pilø said.
While it is difficult to be certain when the scaring stick flags were first exposed, Pilø suggested that they may have been in and out of the ice for the last decade or so.
"In contrast to other organic materials, wood can preserve remarkably well outside the ice under the right circumstances. It naturally freeze-dries, which is the same process used for preserving wood in a conservation lab today. Wood and bone are often the only materials left on our sites, if the melted-out finds have been exposed for a longer time," Pilø said.
The fieldwork is ongoing and further surveys of the site where the scaring stick flags were found last Saturday are planned in the coming weeks.
"We plan to continue surveying and collecting finds on our sites until winter snow arrives. We now have 69 known ice sites and more than 4,000 finds," Pilø said. "As the ice continues to retreat there will be even more sites and finds appearing, and the finds will get older. We are melting back in time."
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