Archaeologists working with Norway’s Secrets of the Ice program recently got a shock when a arrow shaft they had previously dated to the Iron Age turned out to be some 4,000 years old.
The scientists had collected the arrow from the side of a mountain, Lauvhøe, and at first, it looked like other Iron Age arrows collected from the area. But after the researchers cleaned the glacial silt off one end, they found a notch befitting a stone arrowhead and not an iron one. The team co-directed by Lars Holger Pilø – an archaeologist with the local Department of Cultural Heritage – concluded that the arrow dated to the Stone Age, pending radiocarbon dating.
Whatever the results, the arrow joins a wealth recovered by Secrets of the Ice, which has recovered examples from as early as 6,000 years ago from the melting ice of Norway, according to secretsoftheice.com.
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