Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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A landslide in Norway around 800 B.C. likely covered a cult site that archaeologists have finally uncovered 2,800 years later.
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An excavation working ahead of a highway expansion project found clues to past human activity under the landslide.
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Key finds included longhouses, a burial mound, and carved stones likely associated with cult activity.
An ancient Norwegian cult site was active until the time a landslide struck in roughly 800 B.C. Since then, nobody has known about any of what was buried—that is, until a recent archaeological excavation ahead of a highway expansion project revealed clues to human activity in the area roughly 2,800 years ago.
The landslide deposited up to 10 feet of clay soil in the Gauldal River Valley in central Norway. The soil hid what was buried beneath it for centuries, until the experts recently uncovered the unexpected past human activity. And what they found was surprising.
“It’s a very special find,” Hanne Bryn, an archaeologist with the NTNU University Museum, told Science Norway. “We’ve never found anything quite like it. In a central Norwegian context, it’s entirely unique.”
The special find included two longhouses, burial sites, and engraved rocks that point to the area being a 3,000-year-old cult site. Human bone fragments found in the area—there’s no evidence people were present in the region at the exact time of the landslide—date to between about 1000 B.C. and 800 B.C., showing that the religious center may have still been in use at the time of the soil’s massive movement.
The most striking discovery came at the end of a longhouse, where a collection of stones covered a smaller stone with engravings on both sides. The stone—about eight inches by four inches—featured an engraving of a human stick figure holding a bow and arrow and standing alongside a dog. Some of the image was engraved and other parts were “pecked.” Flip it over, Bryn said, and there’s another human figure with a shape, pecked into place, with a ship engraved next to it.
“It’s a very special find,” Bryn said. “It’s so small. It’s portable, you could carry it in your pocket. Finding portable stones like this, lying in the landscape where they were once used, is especially rare. There aren’t many discoveries that compare.”
Overall, the site consisted of two main areas, each anchored by a longhouse between 30 and 40 feet in length. A mixture of burial areas exist throughout the site, some with mounds made of stones and others with stone slab chambers. Loose stones with carvings peppering the site included one with a pecked footprint image.
What was missing from the site, though, was any evidence of a settlement. While the team discovered fire pits, they believe they were used for making bronze pieces for rituals, and the longhouses and stone burial sites were all for ritual needs. “It points to a site of special significance,” Bryn said. “These stones had a ritual significance, together with the burial structures.”
The discoveries could keep coming. The team already found additional rock carvings, including in areas near the excavation. “This whole area is a Bronze Age cultural landscape,” Bryn said. “There was quite a bit of activity here.”
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