The History Blog

The second of a 1300-year-old pair of skis has been discovered in the Mount Digervarden ice patch in southern Norway. Together they form the best-preserved pair of ancient skis in the world, and the only ones with surviving bindings that provide essential information on how the skis were worn.

A team of glacier archaeologists discovered the first of the pair in the Digervarden ice patch in 2014. Complete with surviving birch bindings, it was an exceptional find, one of only two pre-Viking skis ever found with bindings. The team has kept an eye on the site ever since, monitoring the melting ice via satellite in case the receding ice might reveal the ski’s match.

This year they saw the ice had retreated significantly, so three weeks ago a team did a field check and discovered a second ski trapped in the ice 16 feet away from where the first ski was found. It was too firmly embedded in the ice to be removed on the spot, so a large, well-equipped team returned six days later to liberate the historic ski. After shoveling away snow and chipping through the thick ice with an axe, team members were able to uncover the entire ski. A little lukewarm water loosened it all the way and the ski was retrieved.

It was found upside down in the ice. When archaeologists turned it face-up, they saw that it too had surviving binding, and it was the exact same type of binding on the ski found in 2014. This was confirmation that they were a matched set.

They are not identical, however. The newly-found ski is in far better condition because it was 15 feet deeper down in the ice than the previous find. At 6’2″ long and seven inches wide, it is seven inches longer and .8 inches wider than the first ski. This is likely due to the 2014 ski having shrunk and warped from being more exposed than its partner.

There are other differences as well, which is to be expected with handmade objects that experienced all kinds of wear and tear in the mountains of Iron Age Finland.

Three twisted birch bindings, a leather strap and a wooden plug go through the hole in the foothold of the new ski. The ski found in 2014 only had one twisted birch binding and a leather strap through the hole. Both skis have a hole through the tip. There are subtle differences in the carvings at the front of the skis. The back end of the new ski is pointed, while the back end of 2014 ski is straight.

The foothold of the new ski shows repairs, so it was well used. A part of the back end of the ski is missing. The missing piece is presumably still inside the ice. Whether it broke when lost or while inside the ice may be possible to say at a later stage based on a careful study of the edge of the break.

Part of the leather strap of the heel binding of the new ski had come off but it lay on the ground close by. Both skis are missing the upper part of the toe binding of twisted birch. We found pieces of twisted birch close to the new ski and this may belong to the binding. We cannot to say for sure if the binding of twisted birch broke before the skis were left behind, or whether the ice caused it.

This video captures the excavation and recovery of the ski:

The well-preserved remains of a Bronze Age settlement have been discovered in Sartène, Corsica. The site, located on a hillside overlooking the Rizzanesi river, was excavated in late 2019, early 2020 in advance of housing construction. State archaeologists unearthed the material remains of three dwellings that were part of a fortified village from the early Bronze Age (ca. 2000 B.C.).

On the southern slope of the hill, the most exposed to an attack, archaeologists found evidence of three phases of defensive fortifications. In the first phase, wooden palisades were erected in several rows. In phase two, the village dismantled the palisades and dug a triangular ditch. Behind the ditch, an earthwork rampart was built and a single palisade erected at its peak. The ditch from this system was filled in around 1500 B.C. and a double dry stone wall filled with smaller stones was built on top of it.

Archaeologists estimate the village covered more than a hectare (2.4 acres) in area and contained an estimated dozen dwellings. The remains of the dwellings that have been excavated thus far include heretofore unknown details about life in Bronze Age Corsica.

The discovery of the roof rafter installation trenches as well as the discovery of the sand pits allow us to observe the structuring of the internal space of the houses. Divided into three rooms and bounded by a dry stone masonry base, these extend over an area of ​​approximately 50 m². The study also shows that some houses were built entirely of wood.

In addition, the archaeologists observed that the subsistence economy of the village was based on the cultivation of cereals in the surroundings, on the picking of acorns and on livestock. The meats were then smoked to be stored for several months. Silos and silage jars (buried in the earth) were used to store these commodities. Finally, craftsmanship is materialized by a discreet metallurgy and by the presence of stone ornaments and dishes.

A Bronze Age sword broken in seven pieces has been discovered in the historic village of Panelia, southwestern Finland. Fewer than 200 bronze objects from the Bronze Age have been found in Finland, and out of those, only 25 of them are swords or daggers, so this is an extremely rare find.

The sword was found in late July by metal detectorist Matti Rintamaa who had bought his first metal detector just two weeks earlier. After scanning his own backyard, he moved on to the yard of his childhood home where his parents still live. First he found a few small pieces of metal a couple of inches long. Then he found a longer piece that had a noticeable texture on the surface.

He showed pictures of the piece to an experienced metal detecting friend and the friend said it looked like really old bronze, so Rintamaa called it in to Finland’s National Board of Antiquities. After viewing more pictures of the find, National Board of Antiquities experts confirmed that it was indeed old metal, 2,000 to 4,000 years old, no less.

An archaeologist was dispatched to the find site to investigate further. He found the sword’s hilt and a piece of the tip. All seven of the pieces recovered from Rintamaa’s parents’ yard were found at a shallow depth, the deepest just six inches under the lawn. Archaeologists believe this was not the original context of the sword. It was likely moved there in a load of topsoil during construction work years ago.

The current village of Panelia was founded in the Middle Ages, but before the Iron Age, a settlement thrived on what was then the shore of the Litorina Sea. When a marine transgression event caused sea levels to rise, what had been a coastal bay dried up and the settlement was abandoned.

The original context of the sword can only be guessed at, but possibly it was once sacrificed to the coastal waters of the ancient Gulf of Panelia. […]

During the Bronze Age, the area around the ancient Gulf of Panelia was densely populated, as evidenced by the area’s numerous burial mounds. Panelia also houses Finland’s largest known Bronze Age burial mound, Kuninkaanhauta (roughly translated as the Royal Tomb).

Archaeologists in Bavaria have unearthed two exceptionally furnished graves from the 6th century each containing a find unique north of the Alps: an ivory comb decorated on both sides with animal scenes, and a red ceramic bowl made in what is now Tunisia.

The comb was found in the grave of an adult man about 40 to 50 years old at time of death. He was a warrior, buried with a full complement of weapons including a long sword, a lance, a shield and a battle axe. A bronze basin was also unearthed in the grave. In a pit next to the grave archaeologists found the skeletal remains of a horse, and the presence of a pair of spurs and the remnants of a bridle found inside the man’s grave indicate he was the rider of the horse buried in the grave next to him.

At the foot of the warrior was a bag made of an organic material. Most of it has decomposed, but there are some remains. That bag was the 6th century version of a toiletries bag, containing a pair of scissors and the ivory comb he would have used to groom his hair and beard. The comb had splintered apart over time, but conservators from the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation were able to piece it back together.

Combs are more frequently seen in funerary contexts from later in the medieval period, but they are typically carved from wood, animal bone or antler. Ivory carvings of any kind were exceedingly rare in the 6th century, and the few surviving ivory combs believed to date from this period are either plain, or carved with Christian or Biblical motifs. This one is also unusually long at more than 5.5 inches, one of the largest combs of any material found in an early medieval funerary context.

The carving on this comb is of extremely high quality. It features a hunting scene of animals non-native to Europe, antelope-like prey leaping away from the predators chasing them. As there are no comparable examples to this one known, archaeologists have not been able to pin down exactly which animals are represented on the scene, if they were meant to be African animals specifically.

The second grave contained the remains of an adult woman who was around 30 to 40 years old when she died. She was buried with jewelry, food offerings, including eggs, and a weaving batten, a tool used to beat the weft on upright looms. Pottery of local manufacture was also found in the grave. To the left of her left elbow was a bowl buried upside-down, but it was not local. On the contrary, it had traveled far to accompany this woman to the afterlife.

Cleanly broken in two pieces but complete, the bowl is an example of high-quality African red slip ware, pottery characterized by a thick ochre/red slip that coats in the interior, and often the exterior, of many forms of vessels. African red slip ware was in active production in what is now Tunisia from the 1st to the 7th century A.D. and was highly sought-after all over the territory (and later former territory) of the Roman Empire. It was traded throughout the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople until production ceased, but this is the first example in such complete condition found in Germany.

The inside of the bowl is stamped in the center with a square cross, a design struck during production of the ceramic. After market, some loops and what look like sixes were scratched around the rim of the bowl. They could have been random doodles, or they may have had linguistic or religious meaning, an unknown form of runic script, for example.

The burials were discovered during an excavation at the site of a new municipal development in the town of Deiningen which is located in the Nördlinger Ries meteorite impact crater of western Bavaria. At the time the graves were dug, the area was populated by Alemanni tribes but under the suzerainty of the Frankish kings of the Merovingian dynasty.

The excavation of the site has unearthed more than 75 graves, including one double grave of a young man and a young woman about 20 years of age who were buried holding hands. They were found just a few feet away from the warrior’s burial. The presence of 6th century graves, especially those of elite individuals, in an organized burial ground rewrites the history of Deiningen which was previously believed to have been settled in the 8th century.

An extremely rare gold bowl decorated with a sun motif that dates back at least 3,000 years has been discovered at the site of a prehistoric settlement in Ebreichsdorf, Austria. There are only about 30 of these finely worked Bronze Age gold bowls known in Europe, and this is the first of its kind discovered in Austria; the second east of the Alps. Most of them come from northern Germany and Scandinavia, with single examples found in Spain, France and Switzerland.

The bowl is two inches high and eight inches in diameter. It is made of a thin sheet of gold finely decorated in repoussé technique (hammered on the back of the sheet to form a raised design on the front). The side of the bowl has rows of concentric circles, lozenges and dots. The bottom of the bowl is decorated with a radiating sun. It contained four other precious objects: two bracelets of spiral wire and two clumps of organic material wrapped in gold wire. The material was either leather or fabric stitched with gold.

The site has been excavated since September 2019 to salvage archaeological material before construction of a railway station. The digs revealed a Late Bronze Age settlement of the Urnfield culture (named for their practice of burying urns containing the cinerary remains of the dead in fields). Occupied between around 1300 and 1000 B.C., the settlement consisted of several pile dwellings built around a large central building. It covered an estimated area of about 25 acres and was home to a community of about 100-150 people. The bowl was found buried against the side of one of the pile dwellings.

The bowl and its contents may have been a votive deposit. The southern edge of the settlement was bounded by a seasonal waterway, a stream or swamp, and archaeologists found almost 500 bronze objects including pins, knives complete with handles, and daggers in the watercourse layer. They also found animal bones and ceramics. There is almost no damage to the finds, so they weren’t thrown out as trash, and the watercourse was too shallow to be navigable so they weren’t accidental losses. The density and distribution of the finds indicate they were deliberately deposited over time.  Archaeologists believe this was a site of ritual importance where objects and animals were thrown in the water for religious purposes.

The bowl is being cleaned and conserved and will go on display at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Meanwhile, it has been digitally scanned and a 3D model created: