What else would we be going to look at on a suburban street called Helleristningen, other than what this Norwegian word means: the rock carving. Situated in an area of housing in Åskollen, south of Drammen on the west side of Oslo Fjord, this street winds its way past a caged outcrop, which has carved … Continue reading Do hunter gatherers dream of electric elk?
What else would we be going to look at on a suburban street called Helleristningen, other than what this Norwegian word means: the rock carving.
Situated in an area of housing in Åskollen, south of Drammen on the west side of Oslo Fjord, this street winds its way past a caged outcrop, which has carved upon it a remarkable depiction of an elk.
This is not just an Elk. It is an ELK. The creature, as carved onto a domed grey rock, measures some 2m in length, and apparently until fairly recently was the largest depiction of an Elk in this format in Norway, until a 4m long elk carving was found at Utenga, in Lier, in 2013.
Unfortunately the light and leaf clitter was appalling for viewing this site, but even so it still charmed us all.
The Åskollen mega-elk is described thus on the local Drammen History webpage (translated obviously, not by me but google, apologies):
This is a work of art from Drammen created around 6,500 years ago! There is a rock carving that you can see at Åskollen. The image is 1.75 m long, and was probably made to bring hunting luck. We don’t know the meaning of the strange marks and lines on the animal’s body, but we assume it has something to do with the magic of capture.
To my untrained idea, the patchwork pattern of lines on the side of the elk look like the guts, internal organs and cords, all of which would have been of huge use in the daily life of the hunter-gatherers who both revered and killed these beasts. (I am far from the only person who thinks this.) This depiction therefore has the quality of an X-ray, perhaps appropriate as rock carvings on outcrops like this could be viewed as marking thin places where the skin of the world is so thin that you can see its ribs.
This is emphasised today with the remnants of blood red paint filling in the lines that describe the form of the elk, fluid tracings, a practice that was once commonplace in Norway but that is now no longer approved of for conservation reasons.
The gate into this small square fenced compound has a rather threadbare metal noticeboard attached to it, with a brief paragraph of explanation for residents and visitors, in three languages (Norwegian, English, German). They have also gone for the guts theory, with an added fecundity angle towards the rump of the ‘great elk’. I was never very sure about the small bird however, even when tracing the symbols with my fingers, but I very much approve of the concept of hunting-magic.
I visited this panel in October, guided by Norwegian archaeologist Professor Håkon Glørstad, who works for the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo University. He smoothly drove me and a few other archaeologists around the west flank of the Oslo fjord on a glorious fieldtrip, taking in vast Viking burial mounds, the most northerly Neolithic dolmen in Europe, and a sea-side lunch. As we drove away from one rock art panel, Håkon made a wonderful observation about how loved elk were by the hunters – they would even have dreamt about them he said while negotiating a traffic intersection. And the rock art depictions of these creatures is indeed dreamlike – almost hallucinatory, meat and miscellaneous supplies on the hoof, a mobile IKEA. Electrifying.
This took on extra significance when he took us to see another rock art panel in the same conurbation, this one on the Forest Road in Skogerveien, but one that has evidence of rather more investment into the curation and display of the carved outcrop.
Here is a stunning panel carved with two fish, a big fish or whale, a big and small elk (mini-moose) and other forms that have variously been described as beaver, bird or bloke. This is on a suburban street corner, and is displayed within a stone compound sheltered by a curving roof, all supported by a steel frame. This elegant structure is crammed into the a corner space right beside a house, and it is something of a surprise that this structure does not have its own number and post-box. There is a real degree of discomfort here, an uneasy relationship, that is reinforced by the knowledge (from the Cultural Memory website linked to above) that “Samples were taken under the road, but the rock was blown to pieces during the road construction“. Here, prehistory and the needs of the modern world did not so much crash together as explode.
That’s a shame, as this seems to be what the bigger picture once looked like.
This is a big rock, reddish in hue – granite for goodness sake! – with the fine range of animal symbols carved over the surface having a very kinetic form, a menagerie of movement (or as MR James put it, ‘movement without sound’). There is a much more stylised elk than we saw at the other panel, almost angular, and lacking in the guts department, plus a much smaller mini-elk, perhaps a representation of perspective Father Ted style. Then there are the fish! Or are they leaves? The supposed whale is a veritable whopper, perched towards the top of the humpbacked outcrop. The detail is nicely rendered and they look almost alive, pecked and ground into life.
This set of figures is, as reported in the page for this site in the wonderful Megalithic Portal, only scratching the surface of the scale of these scratches on the surface, as the panel “consists of 46 different figures, but only 7 of them have been made possible to view for visitors”. Some may survive below the road I suppose, under which the panel slips like a petrified lava flow.
The juxtaposition of the fish and elk, of the water and the land, make this a powerful image. It suggests to me a place of flux, of a malleable materiality. This reminds me of the similarity between cup-and-ring marks, and ripples on otherwise still water: rock art somehow turns stone into liquid, and it is possible to believe that these fish are swimming through the rock. This is a rock of conflations. Lahelma (2007) has described the large elk still on display here as a ‘boat-antlered elk’, that is, the horns are also a boat motif, a relatively common combination left behind by Eurasian hunter-gatherers. The fact that the symbols must have been carved over an unknown time in relation to one another simply adds to the sense of this as an emergent narrative of contradictions and liminality.
The sense of movement that leaps out from this rock art panel is reinforced by Lahelma’s suggestion that we can fall back on more recent ethnographic accounts of hunters of the far north. For them, “both elk and boats could function as the shaman’s vehicles in the passage from this world to the other”, reinforcing my other comments about such sites being liquid, thin places. But enough – this is not a blog about rock art, fascinating as it is to speculate, but rather about the presentation to the public, and the urban setting.
A small shiny plaque reads (and again I have translated): The securing of and information about the petroglyphs has been financed with contributions from the DNB Savings Bank Foundation [a charitable foundation] [and then some stuff about the charity].
That’s nice but not very exciting. What is exciting however is that there is a bank of light switches that, when pressed, illuminate each of the symbols carved onto the rock for a short while. This, even in the late afternoon sunlight, was a special effect that dissolves away the faint traces of red paint one can still see even on this site. Electrifying.
This creates a similar effect to the more traditional paint, but obviously is not as potentially damaging to the rock art. I would have loved to be there at night, to see this in the dark, this nocturnal canvas, and I know that there is a school of thought that prehistoric sites such as this may well have been designed to view by moonlight. This is also perhaps when some of these animals would be most comfortable and relaxed. It made me wonder: do hunter gatherers dream of electric elk?
There is a rather less innovative noticeboard at the bottom of the street that I confess I was only able to photograph rather badly from the car!
These two rock art panels are in their own right rather wonderful, and it was interesting to see how they have been absorbed into the urban world so comfortably, almost effortlessly. The Åskollen panel shows an earlier iteration of this process, with a street name and cage combination that works effectively enough. The deep red paint traces that remain here are indicative of this site being representative of an earlier ethos for the study and presentation of these sites, but the main thing is that it remains, and was not compromised or moved to make way for houses. The Skogerveien panel is startingly futuristic, the curves, steel and neon giving this ancient rock a science fiction look, the animal symbols carved onto the side almost like branding that someone was paid a million pounds to design. This site is closer to houses but also feels more removed, almost cave-like in its form, the fish and elk looking to escape from the 21st century hunter-gatherers camped all around them, the last survivors in the tarmac jungle.
There is no doubt that in Norway they know how to do urban prehistory well!
Sources and acknowledgements: firstly I would like to give a big thanks to Håkon Glørstad for taking us on this day trip which involved a lot of driving! Thanks also to the archaeologists who joined us on the day, Rosie Bishop, Ingrid Mainland, and Astrid Nyland. We had a lot of fun!
Source cited: Antti Lahelma 2007 ‘On the Back of a Blue Elk’: Recent Ethnohistorical Sources and ‘Ambiguous’ Stone Age Rock Art at Pyhänpää, Central Finland, Norwegian Archaeological Review, 40:2, 113-137
Trond Lødøen 2017 The Meaning and Use(-fulness) of Traditions in Scandinavian Rock Art Research. DOI:10.2307/j.ctvh1dpgg.5
