Rock carvings at Alta — petroglyph
Andreas Haldorsen · CC BY-SA 4.0

Rock carvings at Alta

  • 2 min read
  • 69.947° N 23.188° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • One Alta panel shows what is thought to be the world's oldest depiction of a hunting fence, carved roughly 7,000 years ago.
  • Some carved animals are shown pregnant, with the unborn young drawn visibly inside the mother's body.
  • Bears, once a central motif in hunting and ritual scenes, disappear from the carvings after about 1700 BC.
  • Archaeologist Jan Magne Gjerde's research in 2010 pushed the oldest phases of the carvings back by about a thousand years.
  • Knut Helskog of the University of Tromsø divided the carvings into five chronological groups, dated by the height of ancient shorelines.
  • The carvings were made with quartzite chisels struck by stone hammers, and stone tools stayed in use even after metal arrived.
  • Many boats carry animal-head prows, and the largest hold up to about 30 people, evidence of skilled boat building and sea travel.
  • Alta's imagery closely resembles prehistoric rock carvings found in northwestern Russia.
  • The World Heritage property groups five sites around the fjord: Jiepmaluokta, Storsteines, Kåfjord, Amtmannsnes and Transfarelv.
  • Researchers document the faint figures with quartz powder, photography and 3D scanning, as moss and lichen slowly creep over the rock.

Why it is worth it

When the first figures were spotted on the shore rocks of Alta in the autumn of 1973, nobody expected the scale of what followed. More than 6,000 carvings have since been found at several sites around the head of the Altafjord in Finnmark, and the site is Norway's only prehistoric World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1985. The main locality at Jiepmaluokta, a Northern Sami name meaning "bay of seals", alone holds more than 3,000 figures.

The carvings were made over roughly four and a half thousand years, from around 4200 BC to around 500 BC, by hunter-gatherers who most likely worked the rock with quartzite chisels. Because Scandinavia has been rising since the end of the last ice age, the youngest carvings sit lowest: each generation carved at the shoreline of its day, and the land has since lifted the older panels several dozen metres inland. Reading the panels from top to bottom is, in effect, walking forward in time.

The imagery is vivid and specific. Reindeer dominate, often in herds, sometimes penned behind fences for communal hunts; elk, birds and fish appear alongside boats that grow over the centuries into large, animal-prowed vessels carrying dozens of people. Bears have a special place, shown emerging from dens with tracks running vertically through the scenes, which some researchers read as a link to beliefs about death or other worlds. There are fishermen with lines, figures in distinctive headgear who may be leaders or shamans, and geometric signs that nobody has convincingly explained.

The World Heritage Rock Art Centre - Alta Museum, which moved to the site in 1991 and won the European Museum of the Year Award in 1993, manages a network of wooden boardwalks through the boggy ground, with shorter and longer loops of about 1.2 and 1.9 km. The outdoor carvings can only be seen once the snow has gone, usually from May to October; in winter the indoor exhibition shows carved boulders, Sami culture and the northern lights.

Getting there

The museum and the main carving field are at Hjemmeluft, about 4 km from the centre of Alta. Alta Airport (ALF) is about 8 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Norway 38The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Rock Art Sites 5The Most Remarkable Rock Art Sites 16The Most Mystical Archaeological Wonders 73The Most Mystical Places 138The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

The Rock art of Alta are located in and around Alta Municipality in Finnmark county in northern Norway. Since the first carvings were discovered in 1973, more than 6,000 carvings have been found on several sites around Alta. The largest locality, at Jiepmaluokta about five kilometers (3.1 mi) from Alta, contains thousands of individual carvings and has been turned into an open-air museum. The site, along with the sites Storsteines, Kåfjord, Amtmannsnes, and Transfarelv, was placed on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites on 3 December 1985. It is Norway's only prehistoric World Heritage Site.

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