A Bronze Age leather shoe, about 3,000 years old, is recognized as Norway’s oldest footwear. It belonged to someone who could have been a woman or a young man, and it was discovered among thousands of items unearthed from the dramatic melt of mountain glaciers over the past two decades. Today, researchers warn that climate change could jeopardize such discoveries, a concern echoed by Life Science and scholars at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The shoe’s intimate preservation beneath ice helps illuminate a long human story that keeps unfolding as the ice recedes.
Compared with artifacts pulled from marshy soils rich in acidity or remains buried deep beneath heavy glaciers, items recovered from Norse ice typically arrive in remarkable condition. The ice in Norway tends to be stable, inert, and free of aggressive chemicals, allowing gear, garments, textiles, and even plant and animal traces to survive with minimal degradation for thousands of years. As vast ice fields shrink, the elements gain access to exposed finds. In recent decades, researchers have watched entire landscapes of ice vanish, and with that loss comes an urgent need to document what emerges before it disappears. Satellite imagery analyzed in 2020 showed that more than 40 percent of the ten known ice patches had melted, a stark indicator of the speed at which discoveries can vanish. This insight comes from archaeologists including Birgitte Skar, a co-author of the report, who notes that climate-driven retreat threatens both the artifacts themselves and the broader archive of Norway’s past. (Life Science; Norwegian University of Science and Technology attribution)
The 3,000-year-old shoe was first identified in 2007 within the Jotunheimen mountain region of southern Norway, a landscape that also yielded several arrows and a wooden shovel. The find, dating to around 1100 BCE, stands not only as the oldest shoe in Norway but may represent the most ancient garment ever uncovered in Scandinavia. Ongoing fieldwork at the Jotunheimen site has uncovered even older items, including a 6,100-year-old arrow shaft, which is among the oldest artifacts found in Norwegian glaciers. The proximity of the shoe to these other relics suggests repeated human activity over millennia in a place that repeatedly served as hunting grounds and travel routes for communities living in these storied mountains. The assemblage highlights how people used and moved through this region long before modern borders and states existed, offering a window into daily life, craft, and mobility in ancient Norway.