Relics of the Ancient Past Revealed in the Swiss Alps

"[Once they melt out to the surface of a glacier, leather and other organic materials can be destroyed by the elements and the meltwater in just two years]. You have to have a rapid response, which is problematic for glacial archaeology,"

"We say that glacial archaeology is to find a needle in an iceberg."

"[There are relics in the Alps glaciers from the Middle Ages, including the peak of the Black Plague. The Valais archaeologists haven't had any infections from ancient microbes, but we don't want to become an] archaeological experiment."

"We know that in other regions they have problems with that." 

Dr. Romain Andenmatten  

Archaeologists uncover mule bones on the Theodule glacier in Switzerland, near Zermatt. (Sophie Providoli)

In the Swiss Alps, glaciers and ice patches are melting faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. As they begin to disappear, objects locked away under ice for millennia are surfacing. A 2,500-year-old ski among them. As he was exploring  the disappearing remains of the ice at a mountain pass called Col de Barberine in Switzerland on a bright morning, Dr. Andenmatten, 42, eyed a one-meteer-long slat of grey-coloured wood, lying between the ice edge and rocks. 

At this same elevation of 2,300 meters, Dr. Andenmatten three years earlier had discovered a similar plank with a tapered end, suggesting it might possibly be a ski. It was revealed to date from about the fifth century B.C., during the Iron Age, through carbon dating. More recently Dr. Andenmatten had reason to muse over whether he had discovered the second piece of a pair. Representing the latest discovery in an expanding treasure-trove of ancient tools, garments and human remains recovered by archaeologists from the shrinking ice of the Alps.

Following a winter of scant snow and a summer of heat waves, 2026 turned out to be another year of fast-shrinking glaciers in Switzerland which has shed close to 20 percent of their volume in the past five years alone. At this pace of global warming, 97 percent of glaciers today across the Alps could entirely melt by the end of this century. Elsewhere throughout the world, archaeological finds consist of stone, metal and pottery, surviving from ancient eras. Not so in the Alps; there ice has preserved organic materials such as leather, wood, textiles -- and body parts.

"The Stone Age was not really a stone age. Most of what people used and wore was made out of organic materials", observed Regula Gubler, archaeologist with the Swiss canton of Bern. The objects dredged out of the melting ice are as diverse as a birch bark quiver carrying two flint arrow heads from around 2,800 B.C. and a 60-centimetre-long statuette carved from larch, a human figure at one end, a sharpened point at the other, dated from the last two centuries B.C., a mystery object whose purpose can only be hypothesized. 

This Iron Age statuette is one of the most mysterious objects to surface on Switzerland's melting glaciers. (Morgan McFall-Johnsen)

The icy mountain passes must have represented a tumult of activities from the presence of hunters, herdsmen and traders travelling the heights and the valleys on mules, taking preferred pathways between valleys, irrespective of the steepness of the elevations encountered; hardy souls fully engaged in their busy pursuits of existing and flourishing in the environment they knew best. 

Operating out of the canton of Valais, archaeologists developed an app named Ice-Watcher which anyone, from hikers to shepherds, even crystal collectors are free to use, and with it, report on potential finds they've come across in the mountains. An archaeologist for Valais's cantonal government, Dr. Andenmatten became aware in 2024 through the app of fragments of wood seen in an ice patch, compelling him to hike up to a crossing called Restipass to collect some wood pieces he later dated to the Bronze Age, perhaps 3,000 years of age.

He speculated that among them were intended alert markers staked in the ice to mark pathways for travellers, some of which may have been meant as warning signs of crevasses ahead. Others might have represented pieces of a sled or scraps of firewood. He returned more latterly with a colleague to investigate what this year's overheated temperatures had led to -- more ice melting and the prospect of more intriguing coughed-up finds released by the shrinking ice packs. On their return it was to discover that the ice had completely melted.  

Researchers process sticks from one col. (Morgan McFall-Johnsen)

 As they looked about, Dr. Andenmatten's eye rested on two slender pieces of wood, with smooth, squared-off edges, patterned throughout with delicate tree rings. Rotating the pieces, it did not appear obvious to Dr. Andenmatten that they would fit together, but they did. Once reunited into their original unity of purpose they appeared as they were meant to; an implement that had been carefully crafted by human hands so many aeons earlier.

Organic material once defrosted and exposed begins to swiftly decompose. With the prevalence of so many small glaciers and ice patches disappearing annually due to Climate Change, some of the relics falling into the hands of enthusiastic amateur treasure hunters, never to be seen by archaeologists, it is anyone's guess how many relics may be missed by science, including those that simply disappear through natural decomposition at being released from the ice and exposed to the upper environment.

The Valais History Museum is inside an old chateau atop a rocky hill in the middle of town. (Morgan McFall-Johnsen)