The Alta carvings are a UNESCO world heritage site
By environment
correspondent Alex Kirby in Alta, northern Norway
Norwegian scientists are working on the best way to protect ancient
rock carvings against the ravages of modern pollution.
The oldest
of the carvings, just outside the town of Alta in the Arctic,
date from about 6,000 years ago.
They were
discovered in 1973, after millennia buried under earth and vegetation.
But they are
already believed to be at risk of deterioration from the effects
of atmospheric pollution.
The manager
of the Alta Museum, responsible for the care of the carvings,
is Hans-Christian Soeborg, an archaeologist.
Experiments
He told BBC
News Online: "Pollution today is all-pervasive. There are
a lot of pollutants coming from Russian factories close to the
Norwegian border, though the prevailing westerly winds usually
carry them away from us.
"But
we do get emissions from power stations and industry in the United
Kingdom, and we know they are damaging some of the medieval buildings
in southern Norway.
"We are
experimenting with protective covers of different thicknesses
to see what will be the best way to make sure the carvings stay
safe."
Hunting
and music
There are
more rock carvings in Alta than anywhere else in northern Europe,
a total of about 3,000 individual figures.
They depict
people, animals, including reindeer, bears, and elk, fish, birds,
boats and weapons.
Some carvings
appear to show hunting scenes, and others are thought to represent
musicians holding instruments like the "runebommen",
the shamanic drum used in rituals by the Sami people of Norway,
Finland, Sweden and Russia.
The entire
site was placed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1985. It lies
at the head of the Alta fjord, at Jiepmaluokta, a Sami word meaning
"seal bay".
The site is now well above sea level
When the first carvings were cut into the rock the sea level was
between eight and twenty-six metres higher than today, and the
climate much milder, more like modern southern Norway's.
But the land
rose as the north European icecap withdrew, exposing new rock
surfaces to the carvers.
Their work
is believed to fall into four distinct phases, from the earliest
markings 6,000 years ago to the most recent, just 500 years before
the birth of Christ.
While the
significance of many of the individual carvings seems clear, archaeologists
are still uncertain of the meaning of some of the groups, and
of the site as a whole.
The carvings
were probably meant partly to bring good luck to the hunters and
to give them power over their prey.
Meaning
obscure
Beyond that,
though, they may well have served a religious purpose as part
of the ritual of the Stone Age people of the area.
They may have
been an essay in cosmology, an attempt to place humans and the
natural world in their proper context and to link them to worlds
beyond.
But it may
be wrong to try to wring meaning out of every carving and every
rock face, Hans-Christian Soeborg warns.
"The
life-style and the artefacts of these people were so different
from our own that there is no reason to think we should recognise
everything they chose to depict."
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