Seen from the air, the peninsula that is home to the mid-Norway town of Ørland and the nation’s Main Air Station, looks like the head of a seahorse with its nose pointed south.
It didn’t always look this way, though.
A couple of thousands of years ago, Ørland’s peninsula looked more like the crook of a finger, with a bay sheltered on its southern side. At that time, Norway’s land area was still recovering from the last Ice Age, and the weight of the ice was so great that it actually depressed the ground, creating a bay. The land has since risen up, or rebounded, to form the dry land we know today.
That 1500-year-old sheltered bay and the fertile fields surrounding it turned out to be the perfect home for a settlement of Iron Age Norwegians – Norwegians who actively traded and liked their bling, if archaeological finds from the recent dig are any indication.
“This was a very strategic place,” says Ingrid Ystgaard, project manager at the Department of Archaeology and Cultural History at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) University Museum. “It was a sheltered area along the Norwegian coastal route from southern Norway to the northern coasts. And it was at the mouth of Trondheim Fjord, which was a vital link to Sweden and the inner regions of mid-Norway.”
New facilities and expanded runways
Ørland has long been known to archaeologists as a potential treasure trove of finds, because of its strategic location.
But because archaeologists can’t just go around digging up areas where they think there might be interesting remains, they have to wait for the opportunity to arise – as when Norway made the decision to purchase 52 new F-35 fighter jets.
The jets will need new facilities at Ørland, and the Air Force will also expand existing runways to accommodate the jets. Norwegian law requires a preliminary archaeological study of any construction site, and additional follow-up if anything of significance is turned up.
Size of the site adds significance
The size of the expansion puts the total area that archaeologists first need to study at roughly 91,000 m2, or nearly three times the area of a good-sized shopping centre.
This, Ystgaard says, is a bonanza, because the size of the area allows archaeologists to see how different longhouses, garbage pits and other finds relate to each other.
“We’re really able to put things in context because the area is so big,” she said. The size of the dig also means there are lots of archaeologists at work, and for a long time.
Early Medieval Norwegians liked their bling
By Nancy Bazilchuk