Archaeologists in Norway have found weapons and secret hideaways on a mountain where hunters waited for reindeer more than a millennium ago.
Three of the five arrows recovered by the archaeological team are up to 1,700 years old. The stone-built hunting blinds made the hunters invisible to nearby reindeer.
The hunter would get up and start shooting arrows when the reindeer had approached to within a few meters.
Pil and his colleagues have trekked into the mountains to look for artifacts exposed by the glaciers. They found this site in 2013 but weren't able to do a large systematic survey there until they found the weapons and hunting blinds.
Ancient arrows from reindeer hunters have been found in Norway.
Three of the arrows have preserved iron arrowheads. The weapons are believed to have been made between A.D. 300 and 600.
Pil told Live Science that one of the three iron arrowheads is a rare type not found at the ice before or in graves in the lowlands. When Secrets of the Ice announced the findings on social media in February, they received a lot of comments that it was a spearhead, but the arrow shaft was found next to it, so it is an arrow.
The other two arrows are likely from the first millennium B.C.
The hunters hid in the blinds because the reindeer were very wary of movement.
The hunters needed a good place to hide because the arrows couldn't have flown more than 20 m. Secrets of the Ice wrote that if there wasn't one, they built one of their own.
The hunters probably lived in the valleys, but had large hunting stations higher up in the mountains. People lived in simple settlements during the Stone Age. They lived in grand longhouses down in the valley during the Iron Age. Live Science previously reported on the discovery of some of these longhouses.
The team found 77 pieces of reindeer antler and bone and 32 scaring sticks, which would have been placed in the ground like fence posts to guide spooked reindeer toward the archers. The scaring sticks were made during the Iron Age.
The terrifying sticks were used to lead the reindeer toward the hunting blinds, but how this happened is still something that we are trying to understand.
Pil and his colleagues are going to continue surveys in the mountains. According to a statement released in February by the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, a new study shows that the total glacier area in Norway has shrunk by more than a decade.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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