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Alta Fjord, taken just in front of the museum. The point (not quite a peninsula) on the right side of the picture is where the first people came ashore (i.e the oldest finds). The two people in the picture are returning from the rock carvings which are approximately 100m from the water. This is a composite of three photos joined to give a panorama which is very evocative of the fjord area. Per should be proud of all these photos, but this one in particular is a superb composition.
It is idyllic in this shot, but I can imagine the wind howling and the snow driving across this landscape in winter. In the ice age, all of this would have been under a very thick layer of ice and snow. Fjords are formed by glaciers as they plough through the landscape to the sea in almost a straight line, unlike a river which twists and turns. When the glacier retreats, the sea comes in to form a fjord in its place.
The drawings were made over a long period of time and the most ancient were carved in the rock over 6200 years ago, while the younger ones are 2500 years old.
From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_904000/904501.stm
There are more rock carvings in Alta than anywhere else in northern Europe, a total of about 3,000 individual figures.
They depict people, animals, including reindeer, bears, elk, fish, birds, and boats and weapons. Some carvings appear to show hunting scenes, and others are thought to represent musicians holding instruments like the "runebommen", the shamanic drum used in rituals by the Sami people of Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia. The entire site was placed on Unesco's World Heritage List in 1985. It lies at the head of the Alta fjord, at Jiepmaluokta, a Sami word meaning "seal bay".
When the first carvings were cut into the rock the sea level was between eight and twenty-six metres higher than today, and the climate much milder, more like modern southern Norway's.
But the land rose as the north European icecap withdrew, exposing new rock surfaces to the carvers.
Their work is believed to fall into four distinct phases, from the earliest markings 6 000 years ago to the most recent, just 500 years before the birth of Christ.
The red paint is done by an archaeologist to make it easier to see the carvings. It is not known whether they were coloured at the time they were completed. Per went to a lecture by the director of a Danish museum who said that the carvings most likely weren't coloured originally, but they were very visible just around sunset, and almost invisible for the rest of the day.
Per writes: 'I've seen on Swedish TV that the scientists use water on the rocks when looking for them. This changes the way the light reflects from the surface and make them visible. They then use chalk to highlight them and later use paint when they are sure about their interpretation. To me it makes sense that they weren't painted then. You'll have to know where to be and look and at the right time of day they would appear before your eyes as by magic, making them seem more mystic and powerful.'
Below are two pictures of reconstructions of the old local boats from Alta, as shown on the rock carvings above.
These are copies of fish hooks used in the stone age as shown in the display above, below the boat. They are of superb workmanship, and as is so often is the case, the care lavished on them is out of all proportion to their use. People like to make beautiful things.
This is a reconstruction of a larger boat. It is a later design boat seen on other rock carvings from around 4 500 BP. This design is still used today for sailing on the Alta and Tana rivers, with only two modifications to accommodate a small outboard engine and to protect the propeller in the shallow water.
The one above is a boat used for fishing and maybe hunting. It's long and slender, something in between a canoe and a kayak. Per says: 'I can't imagine more than four people aboard such a vessel, because it's narrow and I expect that you used to sit on the bottom. It's ideal for use on rivers and smaller fjords.'
It should be noted that neither of these is a Viking ship. Viking ships have wider seating, accommodating at least two persons rowing side by side and have a raised stern and deck making them seaworthy even in rough waters and high seas, and they were apparently the first ones to have a mast. This size would be used as a trading vessel on rivers and as a raider. The Vikings also had a much bigger ship type called a "Knarr" where the ballast alone would be more than 10 metric tons.
The following were photos sent by Per which may be of interest to others, as they were to me:
The 22 square kilometre island of Anholt in the middle of the Kattegat between Denmark and Sweden is composed of two different parts: 30-50 m high moraine hills in the west, Vesterlandet, shaped by the inland ice at the end of the last Ice Age, and a large marine foreland in the east, osterlandet. Anholt was originally forested mainly by scotch pine, Pinus sylvestris.
In the 17th century the inhabitants felled what remained of the forest. Therefore the former woodland was transformed into a large infertile area, the so-called desert. However, nowadays the Anholt desert constitutes the largest, connected area of the north-western European lowlands containing the rare and very vulnerable type of lichen heath, connected with large areas of inland dune, heath, crowberry and grass heaths as well as good-sized white and grey dunes. These are habitats of European Union interest, and several are classified as habitats with a high priority, furthermore they include a number of uncommon and rare species.
Over the last decades, considerable parts of this valuable natural territory had become heavily overgrown with self-sown mountain pine Pinus mugo, in total the equivalent of about 25% of the Anholt desert was under direct threat of being overgrown.
