OSLO, NORWAY—According to a Science Norway report, a team of archaeologists used clues from an early nineteenth-century travel journal to find and begin to excavate the site of a shack on Norway’s Hardanger Plateau. The shack was situated along one of the main trade routes across the plateau, and would have provided travelers with overnight shelter from the weather as they crossed the mountains. Inside the shack’s first small room, the researchers found two arrowheads thought to have been left behind by a Viking Age hunter. They also uncovered a Viking Age metal fire striker for starting fires. In the main room, they found a large hearth measuring about three feet by four feet with a 15-inch layer of soot. “It’s packed with animal bones—reindeer, sheep, birds, fish, and other things they’ve eaten,” said archaeologist Marianne Vedeler of the Museum of Cultural History. Usually, she explained, people would have taken their trash outside and disposed of it in a waste pit. “They couldn’t be bothered to do that here,” she said. “They just sat inside, made a mess, and threw everything into the fire.” Samples of soot taken from the bottom, middle, and top layers of the hearth will be dated in an effort to reveal how long the shack was in use. For more on Viking Age Norway, go to "Sailing the Viking Seas."
