Is This 10,000-Year-Old Carving Europe's Oldest Known Depiction of a Boat?
New analysis suggests that rock art found in Norway portrays a sealskin vessel used by Stone Age Scandinavians
By Livia Gershon
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
APRIL 28, 2021
A rock carving discovered in Norway may be one of Europe’s earliest examples of art depicting a boat, reports Garry Shaw for the Art Newspaper.
The image, found in Valle, on the Efjorden fjord in Nordland County, appears to be a life-size representation of a boat made from sealskin, writes Jan Magne Gjerde, a scholar at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology.
Based on the height of the surrounding shoreline, which was higher in the Stone Age than it is today, Gjerde dates the art to between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago. That makes it one of the oldest images of a boat in the world. Previously, the oldest known depictions of boats in northern Europe dated to between 7,000 and 7,500 years ago.
The image—a white outline carved into a rock surface—was probably originally about 14 feet long. A portion of the drawing eroded away over time, and it is now only clearly visible under particular weather conditions. A second carving at the site also appears to show a boat, but just a small part of it remains.
Retired geologist Ingvar Lindahl originally discovered the carving in 2017, as the Local Norway reported at the time.
“This is an extremely important development, a global sensation in fact, and will enter the history of research in a very, very big way,” Gjerde told state-run broadcaster NRK in 2017, per a translation by the Local. “… You can see the keel line and the railing line, and as you move forward you can see a really beautiful finish, forming the boat’s bows.”
The carving may depict a skin boat similar to the umiak vessels used by the Inuit. (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
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