The ten most exciting archaeological discoveries in Rogaland this year

Silver treasure from the Viking Age, a 9500-year-old apple and the bishop’s Q-tip. These are our top ten discoveries this year.

– This year we have found a lot of exciting things in our region. At the museum, we not only have archaeologists, but also conservators, botanists, geologists and skeleton experts. And they have all made exciting discoveries this year,” says Krister Scheie Eilertsen, acting director of the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavanger.  

From early spring to late fall, archaeologists are out in the field digging. Usually they are expected to find prehistoric artifacts, but they also take soil samples to the museum for further analysis. Tiny grains of pollen, for example, can tell us a lot about what the landscape looked like thousands of years ago.  

– “We try to extract as much information as possible from the samples taken. This often gives us completely new and sometimes sensational knowledge,” says Eilertsen.

Here are our top ten discoveries this year:

1. The Viking treasure from Årdal   

More than a thousand years ago, Vikings buried a silver treasure on a cliff in Årdal in Hjelmeland. This fall, surprised archaeologists from Stavanger held it in their hands. The treasure consisted of no fewer than six silver bangles, each with a different, beautiful decoration. It turned out that there had been a powerful Viking farm here on the banks of the Årdalsfjord. In addition to the silver treasure, they also found a large padlock. It had been used to lock a small house, which probably had something valuable inside. What makes both finds particularly exciting for archaeologists is that they have lain untouched for over a thousand years – which means we can get a very special insight into what a Viking farm looked like, which houses were located where, where they cooked – and in this case: How they hid or stored things of value. Taken together, this gives us very special knowledge about how the Vikings lived.   

2. Norway’s oldest discovery of wild apple  

During archaeological excavations, soil samples are collected and analyzed by botanists at the museum. In an excavation on Kvitsøy, archaeologists found a wild apple that is up to 9500 years old. The apple was buried in what used to be the seabed, and has therefore been preserved for so long. Until now, we have only known that apple trees existed in the Viking Age in Norway. This new discovery shows that wild apples came in as a natural species with the oak, elm, ash and linden trees as early as the Old Stone Age – several thousand years earlier.

3. Discovering the glue that holds the Cathedral together  

Several archaeological discoveries have been made in, under and around the cathedral. But it’s only now that our conservators have discovered that there is something more hidden inside the brick walls of the church. They discovered that the stones of which the cathedral is built have been glued together with a type of tar glue that can be traced back to the Middle Ages. This means that the church was built in a completely different way than previously thought. Now they are trying to make a copy of the glue they used back then – a glue that has lasted for 700 years and is of much better quality than the material used today. Perhaps the recipe can provide us with a new – or actually old – sustainable way of building with stone into the future?   

PS! At the museum, you can see for yourself the 700-year-old tar, which moves and flows about 1 millimeter per day.  

4. Exclusive objects bear witness to a powerful Stavanger in Viking times 

Until now, we haven’t had many finds from the Viking Age in Stavanger. But after a new excavation inside the cathedral, several items were found that bear witness to Stavanger’s wealth and status at the time. One of them is a beautiful fitting that was used to decorate clothes. It is typical metalwork from the British Isles at this time, which makes it quite clear that Stavanger had very good trade relations with Britain. The discovery of several other such exclusive objects testifies to the cathedral’s growing wealth and connections to the rest of the world, including the Vatican.

Here you can read more about all the finds in the Cathedral.   

5. A 5000-year-old home at Tau 

In Nordmarka at Tau in Strand municipality, archaeologists found the remains of a stone tent ring. These stones were used by Stone Age people about 5,000 years ago to stabilize the outside of a tent cloth. Many stone tools and remnants of their production were found around the tent ring. This means that the people who lived there sat outside their tents and made tools. These finds will now be analyzed in more detail, and they can probably tell us a lot about how people lived in what was the transition between a hunter-gatherer society and a society with livestock and agriculture. “It’s very rare to find remains of a dwelling from this period in Norway, and this is the first in Ryfylke.  

6. Baby skeleton under the sacristy in the cathedral   

A baby’s skeleton was found buried under the floor in the basement of the north tower, which was the bishop’s office – also called the sacristy. It was a newborn child who probably did not survive birth. The child was therefore too young to be baptized and could not be buried in holy ground, i.e. in the cemetery. Why was it buried in the sacristy? Some preliminary speculation is that it was the bishop himself who had links to the child. Or could it have been a powerful family that was allowed to bury their child in holy ground in secret? Samples have now been taken from the skeleton, which can determine when the child died.  

7. 150-year-old message in a bottle from a famous archaeologist 

In the 1870s, one of the most prominent archaeologists of the time, Anders Lorange, excavated a small part of a ship burial mound at Myklebust in Nordfjordeid in Vestland county. This fall, archaeologists from Bergen conducted a larger excavation of the mound. Our archaeologists examined the area with georadar before the excavation began. Georadar is a machine that is driven over the ground and registers what is located several meters down, before you start digging. At the end of Lorange’s shaft from the 1870s, they discovered a so-called “reflective anomaly” in the georadar data, i.e. something tangible that differed from the surrounding masses. They jokingly told their colleagues in Bergen that this could be “a gift from Lorange!”. And, sure enough, in the shaft they found a message in a bottle from the famous archaeologist. In the bottle was a letter with a greeting to future archaeologists, and a hidden love letter.

Are you more curious about what was in the message in the bottle? Read more on Riksantikvaren’s website.

8. The reliquary of Stavanger’s patron saint

When Stavanger Cathedral was completed around 900 years ago, it was dedicated to the city’s patron saint, Saint Svithun. He was an English saint who died as Bishop of Winchester in 862. When the cathedral was completed, a magnificent reliquary of the patron saint was placed on the high altar. Relics are the remains of a holy person, or objects that have been in physical contact with a saint. This reliquary is said to have contained the arm bone of the English saint. It was wrapped in a cloth and placed in a gold box with precious stones in beautiful colors. There were several such reliquaries, shaped like houses, in Norway in the Middle Ages, but few have survived. The reason is that when the Reformation began in 1536, all Catholic “superstition” was to be eradicated, and all the treasures in the Cathedral were to be removed and destroyed. Until now, it was therefore assumed that these sacred objects had been lost. However, during an excavation in the cathedral this year, archaeologists found a small part of the reliquary. Presumably, some of the church’s treasures were rescued and hidden in the crypt of the church.

9. Norway’s oldest evidence that humans used seaweed and kelp

In a sample taken from a hearth outside the remains of the 5,000-year-old Stone Age settlement in Nordmarka at Tau in Strand, the paleobotanists – who research ancient plants – found charred pieces of seaweed! Seaweed was used as food, fodder and fuel, among other things. These pieces are dated to the period we call the Middle Neolithic (from 3,300 to 2,600 years BC), and fit right in as Norway’s oldest evidence of human exploitation of seaweed and kelp from the sea.

10. A thousand-year-old Q-tip  

In the bishop’s office in the north tower of the cathedral, also known as the sacristy, several small items were also found that bear witness to daily life in the Viking Age and the Middle Ages. Among other things, there was a so-called ear spoon from the Viking Age. This was one of the bishop’s personal belongings and functioned as today’s Q-tip.