The bear images at Alta were also probably part of a bear cult.'

'Its magic meaning could be linked to spring and resurrection. 'Since the bear is shown with tracks, it probably means this image represents a bear emerging in spring from its hibernation den and leaving tracks in the snow,' Søborg says. As his graphite stylus slid back and forth across the paper, images emerged: a bowhead whale, several reindeer, a bear and bear tracks. Not long ago, Søborg was making rubbings on a recently uncovered and cleaned granitic slope. 'The site was holy and the images were imbued with magic,' says Hans Christian Søborg, director of the Alta Museum. Without any knowledge of history, religion and the Bible, Christianity and its iconography are incomprehensible.Īrchaeologists at Alta can speculate, however. To understand why, one can imagine a space alien encountering a Christian church for the first time: a large uninhabited building with strange paintings and a poorly clad man hanging from a cross. If the physical reality of the animals and of the hunting scenes can be understood, any religious meaning of the images remains largely inscrutable. Using kayaks, the Inuit speared swimming caribou at traditional river sites where for untold generations migrating caribou had always crossed and the hunters had waited. The technique was the same employed until the 1950s by Canada´s Inuit. The method was later used extensively by the Saami (Lapps), many Siberian tribes and some northern Indian tribes well into the twentieth century.Īnother group of glyphs depicts hunters spearing swimming reindeer from open boats. One rock panel with 180 figures shows reindeer being herded into a pound or corral made of wooden stakes. The hunting and capture scenes are easiest to understand. They may well have rubbed and colored the finished engravings with the earth pigment ocher, used by other rock painters, and today archaeologists have carefully traced the most important glyphs with a similarly colored, reddish paint to make them more visible. The artists first outlined a figure and then, with immense patience and labor, pecked out the entire form. To make the glyphs, the ancient carvers used chisels, probably of hard, finegrained quartzite, which they struck with hammers of stone or antler, each blow chipping out one small stone flake.

Along the coast they fished, mainly for abundant cod.Ībout 7,000 years ago, probably prompted by a powerful religiosupernatural need and possibly guided by inspired shamans, the people began to record on rock the animals of their world. Inland they were huntergatherers, with reindeer and elk (the European moose) as their main prey. As the ice left, people arrived in this gamerich, fishrich region, the first settling in simple sod huts and tents made of fur about 10,000 years ago. As the ice melted in the waning millennia of the Ice Age, the land, freed from this enormous burden, began to rise. 'The first carvings were made about 7,000 years ago, but for unknown reasons, all carving ceased about 500 B.C.'įourteen thousand years ago, during the last Ice Age, this region of Norway, called Finnmark, was covered by milethick ice caps. 'This was a sacred site for more than 4,000 years,' says Karin Tansem, former curator of the Alta Museum, built near the petroglyphcovered rocks. The carvings, which are dated by measuring the age of shoreline displacement of the carved rocks, now face a modern-day peril: air pollution.Īlta, less than 200 miles from the northernmost point of Europe, was probably the holiest place in the North. What they´ve found has helped them to understand ancient cultures, but the news isn´t all good. Since the discovery, archaeologists have cleaned the sloping granite rocks and removed accumulated plant cover from nearby rock faces. People hunted these beasts, ate them, worshipped them, and with infinite patience and primitive tools, chiseled their images onto a record for time. They offer a magic mirror of the distant past, a look at life thousands of years ago when animals were the center of the human world. There are more than 3,000 of these petroglyphs, and additional ones are discovered each year.

They had happened upon rock carvings that have since provided archaeologists with tantalizing glimpses of the life and lore of Stone Age people. Suddenly, in the soft, slanting light of the midnight sun, they saw icepolished slopes of granite come alive with images of animals and humans. LATE IN AN EVENING in 1973, a father and his son far north of the Arctic Circle were walking home along the coast near Alta in Norway. Granite carvings in Norway show the role animals played in the lives of hunters in the Stone Age

Ancient inuit glyphs