Digging in Norway

'This was a Stone Age settlement. Here are the flat hearth stones: these indentations may be homes...' Knut Helskog, senior curator in the Department of Archaeology, University of Tromso, explains an archaeological dig deep in the Arctic Circle, north of Tromso. Small groups of families lived here as hunters and fishermen nine thousand years ago, he believes; only one or two thousand years after the ice had receded. Helskog and his team of about ten were using the long summer days to dig beneath the turf and berries, working under the auspices of the Tromso Museum.

This particular site at Hamneidef, halfway between Tromso and Alta, is the oldest to be excavated in the Tromso region (Troms), adding to the array of communities that seem to have existed here. During the first days of the dig, in August, a series of flints and crystal scrapers appeared. The microblades with parallel edges, perhaps used as insets with harpoons, indicate a high degree of specialism to enable survival. They were made by striking, not polishing.