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DiscoveryDue to global warming, rapid melting of snow patches and glaciers is taking place in the mountains of Norway as in other parts of the world (Hansen et al. 1985;Spindler 1995;Ceruti 2004;Hare et al. 2004;Suter et al. 2005;Farbregd 2009), and hundreds of archaeological finds emerge from the ice each year. The upland areas in which snow patches are found are little frequented by humans today, but hunting and trapping have been carried out there since prehistoric times. Reindeer often congregate on snow patches in late summer to regulate their body temperature and to avoid parasitic insects, making them attractive hunting grounds (Callanan 2010: 49-50). Artefacts from multiple periods were deposited on the ice patches, many of them made of organic material rarely preserved elsewhere; ice patches provide exceptional preservation conditions for textiles.

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The grave from Gokstad in Norway, dating to ca 900 AD, is one of the best-preserved Viking Age ship graves in the world. The grave mound contained a variety of goods along with human remains, buried in a Viking ship. Several textiles, including embroideries and shreds of what might have been the ship’s tent, were also found. The colors of the textile fragments are now severely faded, but the high quality of the embroidery made of gold and silk threads is still apparent. The style of the embroidery is exceptional, having no equivalents in other Scandinavian graves. The analyses by HPLC coupled with both diode array and mass spectrometric detectors revealed that the striped “tent” cloth as well as the silk thread used for the embroidery were originally dyed with anthraquinones of plant origin (alizarin, purpurin, pseudopurpurin, and anthragallol), markers of madder-type dyestuffs.

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