Melting Ice Reveals Lost Viking Highway's Secrets

Vikings may have captured our imagination with their larger-than-life exploits, but it's easy to forget they were also a practical people. They built sensible settlements, engaged in trade and only occasionally indulged in psychoactive drugs before battle.

They also traveled, sometimes in iconic langskips, sometimes by road.

Back in 2011, archaeologists first discovered a lost highway littered with Viking artifacts — sleds, horseshoes, walking sticks, a 1,700-year old sweater and heap after heap of fossilized horse dung.

But now archaeologists have discovered so much more. They've published new research describing hundreds of items that have since been found along the mountain pass: mittens, shoes, parts of sleds, bones from packhorses.

It likely would have remained hidden forever had the ice not rapidly begun melting, revealing all that roadside Viking litter.

It paints a picture of a well-trodden highway that skirted the Lomseggen mountain ridge, connecting travelers to trading hubs at higher altitudes — and those all-important summer pastures.

The highway wends its way over the Lendbreen ice patch in Norway's Jotunheim Mountains, about 200 miles north of Oslo.

"The pass was at its busiest during the Viking Age around 1000 A.D., a time of high mobility and growing trade across Scandinavia and Europe," study co-author James Barrett, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, tells Smithsonian magazine. "This remarkable peak in use shows just how connected even a very remote location was to wider economic and demographic happenings."

Today, it's essentially a highway to nowhere. The Lendbreen ice patch towers over the tree line, only accessible by helicopter. But that too may be changing, as a warming climate melts away the once impenetrable shield.

A road 'lost to memory'

Using radiocarbon dating, researchers peg the highway's origins to about the year 300. At the time, heavy snow cover would have padded the sharp rocks underfoot, they note. Trading posts likely sprang up along the nearby Otta River. The road likely thrived for many more centuries.

"The decline of the Lendbreen pass was probably caused by a combination of economic changes, climate change and late medieval pandemics, including the Black Death," study co-author Lars Pilø explains in a press statement. "When the local area recovered, things had changed, and the Lendbreen pass was lost to memory."

At some point, the highway may have been consumed by ice and snow, an event that was likely pivotal in preserving those artifacts.

"The preservation of the objects emerging from the ice is just stunning," study co-author Espen Finstad of the Glacier Archaeology program, tells Heritage Daily. "It is like they were lost a short time ago, not centuries or millennia ago."

For archaeologists, the Lendbreen ice patch seems like a gift from the ancient past. But it's alarming that it's unwrapping itself so rapidly.

"Global warming is leading to the melting of mountain ice worldwide, and the finds melting out of the ice are a result of this," Pilø tells Gizmodo. "Trying to save the remains of a melting world is a very exciting job — the finds are just an archaeologist's dream — but at the same time, it is also a job you cannot do without a deep sense of foreboding."