OSLO — The wreck of a German World War II submarine that was sunk with 48 people on board has been found off Norway’s coast during work on an oil pipe, a maritime museum official said Monday.
The “U-486” was torpedoed and broken in two by a British submarine in April 1945 shortly after leaving the western Norwegian town of Bergen, according to Arild Maroey Hansen of the Bergen maritime museum.
There were no survivors.
Lying at a depth of some 250 metres (820 feet), the wreck was found when Norwegian oil company Statoil was scouting the area as a possible location to lay down an oil pipe. Read more.
A rushing river in Nord-Trøndelag County, near the Swedish border, is slowly giving up its secrets.
This summer, archaeologists excavated a smeltery on a little island where advanced metal production was carried out in the 1300s.
“This is the first evidence that copper was produced from copper ore in Norway during the Middle Ages,” says Associate Professor Lars F. Stenvik, at the Museum of Natural History and Archaeology in Trondheim.
He’s spent a lot of time searching for traces of Norwegian copper production from this period. The evidence is starting to fall in place.
In many ways, ore extraction and copper smelting were the starting point for a major modern Norwegian industry, with big mines operating in the 18th and 19th centuries.
But evidence of domestic copper production prior to 1500 has been scant. Read more.
Beer enthusiasts are using a barn in Norway’s Akershus County to brew a special ale which has scientific pretensions and roots back to the dawn of human culture.
The beer is made from einkorn wheat, a single-grain species that has followed humankind since we first started tilling the soil, but which has been neglected for the last 2,500 years.
“This is fun − really thrilling. It’s hard to say whether this has ever been tried before in Norway,” says Jørn Kragtorp.
He started brewing as a hobby four years ago. He represents the fourth generation on the family farm of Nedre Kragtorp in Aurskog-Høland, Akershus County.
Part of the barn has been refurnished as a meeting room, but space was also allotted for small-scale beer production. Read more.
Using a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and magnetometer, surveys have revealed the settlement in Sandefjord in Gokstadhaugen, eastern Norway, has 15 buildings, an 80-metre long street and a port.
Archaeologists from Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History and the Norwegian Institute for Cultural heritage Research (NIKU) were among those that made the discovery, in cooperation with Vestfold County.
Work in Gokstadhaugen began in 2011 with drilling there, as well as experts making geophysical surveys from the sea a northwards in what is called Gokstad Valley (Gokstaddalen).
NIKU’s Knut Paashe told Aftenposten, “There is no doubt that we have encountered a market town-like structure from the Viking age with houses and streets.” Read more.
A Norwegian man is in Canada this week to plead for permission to take a 95-year-old ship built for his countryman, the famed explorer Roald Amundsen, back to Norway where it would become the centrepiece of a new museum.
Jan Wanggaard, manager of the effort to return the Maud to her Norwegian birthplace, is preparing for his appearance Thursday before the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board.
It’s very hard to understand or believe that we will not end up getting the possibility to bring the Maud home,” Mr. Wanggaard said in an interview Monday. “When you look at it in a practical way, everybody agrees that this is the right thing to do.”
The Maud was designed by Mr. Amundsen for a voyage to the North Pole. He was unsuccessful in reaching the top of the world, but the ship still completed a famous crossing of the Northwest Passage and her crew made a host of important scientific discoveries. Read more.
A unique runestone that is the first to mention Norway as a country and that documents the establishment of Christianity there, has been placed on a list of world heritage documents of international importance.
The “Kuli Stone” is the oldest object in the newly launched register of Norway’s list of documents to be included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme. The programme is an international register of documents that are seen as important aspects of our shared international heritage. The Norwegian version was launched on 8 February 2012 and lists documents that are especially important in Norway’s history and to its cultural heritage.
The text on the Kuli Stone is the first known occurrence and use of the term “Nóregi” – “Norway” – in the country it names. The stone has additional importance as it also dates to the establishment of Christianity in the country in a phrase that is often transcribed as:
“… twelve winters Christianity had been in Norway”. Read more.
ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — A reconstruction based on the skull of Norway’s best-preserved Stone Age skeleton makes it possible to study the features of a boy who lived outside Stavanger 7,500 years ago.
“It is hoped that this reconstruction is a good likeness and that, if someone who knew him in life had been presented with this restoration, they would hopefully have recognised the face,” says Jenny Barber, an MSc student at the University of Dundee in Scotland.
She has scientifically rebuilt the face of the strong and stocky Viste Boy, who lived in the Vistehola cave near Stavanger, so that people can now look him right in the eye.
Ms Barber is studying forensic art, an unusual discipline embracing such elements as human anatomy and identification in order to recreate the appearance of an actual person.
This modelling method is primarily employed to assist police investigations, and is little known or used in Norway. But the country’s most extensive reconstruction of a Stone Age skeleton has now been achieved. Read more.
The sunken remains of a ship belonging to famed Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen could be lifted out of Canadian waters and returned to Norway if a group of investors has its way.
The Norwegian investors behind the group Maud Returns Home want to take the wreck of the Maud, one of Amundsen’s ships, out of the shallow waters of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, and bring it back to the explorer’s home country.
“We really think that the Maud deserves a better destiny than to stay forever, falling gradually more and more apart,” Jan Wanggaard, a project manager with Maud Returns Home, told CBC News via Skype from Lofoten, Norway.
Wanggaard said he has spent the past year studying the possibility of floating the Maud back to Norway, where Amundsen is a national legend, and making the shipwreck part of a museum exhibit. Read more.
