Northern Norway’s Incredible Rock Art Museum

The staggering amount of rock art on the shoreline near Alta in Northern Norway depicts hunting, trapping, fishing and other everyday activities from hunter-gatherer life thousands of years ago. It’s the largest such collection of prehistoric petroglyphs anywhere in Northern Europe.

Such is its historic importance, the rock art of Alta became Norway’s first UNESCO World Heritage site in 1985. To this day, it remains Norway’s only prehistoric site on the list.

While much is known about the carvings, one of the big mysteries is why they exist. Possible explanations given by historians about the social context include marking a tribe’s territory, a historical record, use in rituals, or simply artistic expression.

The story of the Alta rock art

Despite the high number of carvings, they remained essentially undiscovered until the 1970s due to the thick growth of moss and lichen on the rocks.

Once the first art was discovered in 1973 just a few miles from Alta, the scale of the carvings quickly became clear with approximately 6,000 individual carvings discovered in the following decades.

Scenes of hunting and fishing dominate the art. Reindeer are featured heavily alongside elk, fish and various kinds of birds. Bears also feature but not only in the context of being hunted, suggesting they were also feared and possibly even worshipped.

Dating of the five main rock art sites around Alta has shown that some of it was created as much as 7,000 years ago, giving new insight into life in the far north during that era. The most recent carvings date from around 500 BCE.

How to visit the rock art

While the World Heritage site is made up of approximately 6,000 carvings spread over several miles around Alta, it’s only the area at Hjemmeluft that is publicly accessible as the Rock Art Center.

The easiest way to get to the center is to drive the 2.5 miles from the downtown part of Alta. It’s also possible to take a public bus from outside the tourist information office.

A visitor center hosts a small exhibition but of course it’s the rock art that everyone comes to see. Open when there is no snow cover, two wooden trails loop around the rocky shoreline and it can take up to 90 minutes to see everything.

Many of the carvings have been painted red to make them easier for visitors to see, although this is no longer done with newly-discovered carvings for conservation reasons. There are now a mix of painted and unpainted carvings to see along the two trails.

A digital museum

The range of rock art in Alta is so comprehensive that other researchers have used the work to further their understanding of rock art all over the world.

For those who cannot make it to Northern Norway, much of the collection of petroglyphs has been digitized to enable such study. The archive is publicly available at altarockart.no.