Archaeologists' most exciting finds:
"A truly magical place"
Almost 10,000 years ago, Stone Age people made knives and spearheads right
here. "It was a fantastic archaeological find," says Astrid Johanne Nyland.
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Archaeologist Astrid Nyland had only a hand-drawn sketch to go by when she travelled to Hemsedal in eastern Norway to find the site that archaeologists uncovered over 50 years ago.
She wanted to take a closer look at the quarry where, for thousands of years, people hammered and chipped away at the rock to find materials for tools and weapons.
As she neared the quarry, she saw the mountainside glittering with shards of white quartzite.
"The quarry turned out to be a truly magical place," Nyland tells Science Norway.
Used quartzite instead of flint
To understand why this quarry is so special, we need to take a look at Norwegian history.
The first people who settled along the Norwegian coast around 11,000 years ago were most familiar with using flint to craft arrows, axes, and knives, according to Norgeshistorie.no.
But flint does not occur naturally in Norway. Small flint nodules had instead been brought to Norway by ice from southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. They were picked up on beaches along the coast.
In the mountains, however, there was very little flint to be found.
As a result, people turned to other types of stone found in the Norwegian mountains to make stone tools. Among them rock crystal, sandstone, rhyolite, mylonite, and quartzite.
Many quarries in Norway
Nyland explains that evidence from the Early Stone Age already shows how selective people were in choosing stone materials.
Several small and large quarries from this time have been found throughout Norway. They are located along the outer coast, inland, and in the high mountains.
To extract stone, people would either strike directly on the rock with hammerstones or use wedges. In some places, archaeologists have also found traces of fire being used.
"Detached pieces and blocks were broken up and roughly shaped on-site, while materials for tools were transported away, often over great distances," says Nyland.
The history of the Halsane quarry
Nyland examined the Halsane quarry in 2012.
The quarry was first discovered by archaeologist Kari Thorrund in 1970, who reported it to the Bergen Museum.
But after that, nothing more happened.
"Until I began my investigations in 2012," says Nyland.
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Although the quarry had been listed in the national cultural heritage database Askeladden, Nyland believed that both the map and the information about its use were lacking.
She therefore agreed with Buskerud County Municipality that she would carry out a more extensive survey of the site.
Nyland's goal was to study how Stone Age people used quarries between 8,000 and 400 years before the Common Era.
Used for thousands of years
Nyland's investigations showed that stone was extracted from the Halsane quarry for several thousand years, throughout the Stone, Bronze, and Early Iron Ages. Until around 400 BCE.
She based her dating on what she found at workshop sites and nearby places where people had lived.
"At these sites, people tested the stones, worked it using various techniques, and produced blanks for tools, which we can roughly date based on their shape and type," says Nyland.
From the quartzite at Halsane, they made arrowheads, spearheads, knives, and scrapers – but not axes, Nyland points out.
What the quarry looks like
The quarry itself consists of a cluster of visible outcrops. The area is also full of various stones that were never used, some of them partially covered in heather and peat.
"Altogether, I estimated the area to be about 4,000 square metres," says Nyland.
That's about the same as seven tennis courts.
The total volume of stone extracted may have been as much as 100 cubic metres, about what would fit in a large lorry container.
Hidden fragments
Atop one of the outcrops lay a heavily used hammerstone.
Perhaps it was used to break pieces loose, Nyland wonders.
"Something I found especially intriguing was that many worked pieces and tool blanks had been deliberately tucked beneath large boulders near the quarry," she says.
They were positioned in such a way that ice and snow could not have pushed them there.
Instead, it seemed as if people had hidden them away, perhaps to collect later.
"Or maybe it was part of their practice, to give something back to the mountain, the ancestors, or the spirits when taking resources," suggests Nyland.
According to her, there are many ethnographic examples of such actions from that time.
One of the best trips
"This was one of the most memorable trips I've had as an archaeologist," Nyland says about the time she spent studying the quarry. "The place is breathtakingly beautiful."
She stresses that the quarry and the surrounding traces of human activity are automatically protected cultural heritage sites.
"This means that while it's legal to visit, it's not permitted to chip off or take stones home," she says.
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Translated by Alette Bjordal Gjellesvik
Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no
References:
Norheim, S. Registrering av Hallsann ved Preinsrud (Registration of Hallsann at Preinsrud), 1978.
Nyland, A.J. 'Befaringsrapport fra Halsane kvartsittbrudd' (Inspection report from the Halsane quartzite quarry), 2012.
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