The 17th of June 1596 is traditionally seen as the first time that a European, or indeed any human, set foot upon the frozen archipelago of Svalbard, historically a hub for the destructive whaling industry and now home to the world-famous seed vault and a number of scientific research bases. Several Russian historians and archaeologists, writing in the journal Fennoscandia Archaeologica, have long claimed that the Pomors, seagoing Arctic Russians making a living trading with the Norwegian coast in the 14th and 15th centuries, discovered Svalbard prior to the Dutchman William Barentz. Historians studying Icelandic and Norse sagas have also contended that Svalbard was discovered sometime in the 11th century and known to the poets of the time as being four days' sailing distance from Iceland, although that has been challenged on the basis that Svalbard simply means 'cold edge' in old Norse, and could refer to any Arctic or sub-Arctic island, such as Jan Mayen or Byornmoya (Bear Island), between Svalbard and Norway.
There is one theory, however, that takes the cake. Shortly after the Second World War, the Swedish archaeologist Hans Christiansson claimed that Stone Age hunter-gatherers circa 3000 BCE had lived on Svalbard and deserted it shortly afterwards, basing his idea on a scattering of finds of flints which appeared to be modified into Levallois spear-points and scrapers. He was convinced that the area of Grønfjorden or Green Fjord, on the main island of Spitsbergen, had been visited by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, and with his Norwegian colleague Povl Simonsen, excavated the whaling site of Russekeila.
To their surprise, nearly 20 flint tool-like artefacts were recovered made of local material. Although Pomor fishermen sometimes used flints to gut fish, for netting and for rope-cutting, the two archaeologists were convinced that these flints were made with a different technique, one known only from Mesolithic sites in Europe. Later excavations of the same site in 1967 by the German archaeologist H .W. Hansen recovered yet more possibly manmade flints, bringing the total found to almost 110. Their suggestion was that the hunter-gatherers had camped there on a seasonal basis, arriving in the summer to hunt seal or polar bears, and returning across an ice bridge to mainland Siberia or northern Norway in the winter.
Despite the exciting possibility, however, research research and re-analysis of the finds has determined that nearly all of the supposed flint tools can be demonstrated to be natural creations. The geology of Svalbard consists in part of naturally flaky Ordovicians and Devonian sedimentary rock, which when exposed to frost, blizzards, thawing, flowing water, glacial advances and high winds, can easily brake off flakes that look very similar to percussions created by human striking. This is very different to the Pomor flints found in houses on the Russian mainland, which were clearly designed to start fires and cut into flesh and bone. To add to this, neither further excavation or satellite archaeology has been able to find any associated settlement, campsite or hearth built by any hunter-gatherers, which would have been a necessity in the freezing environment.
On the other hand, contemporary hunter-gatherers did settle in similarly inhospitable environments. The Independence I culture first ventured onto Greenland from the Bering Strait by between 4500 and 4000 BP, at sites such at Danmarkshavn, while a hunter-gatherer site on Zhokhov Island has been dated as early as 8000 BP, where dog bones and preserved fragments of a dogsled testify to mobile transport across the ice. Although archaeologically studying Novaya Zemyla, close to Svalbard, is difficult because of its remoteness and high levels of nuclear radiation still present from the Tsar Bomba nuclear test, a series of sites have been studied on Vaygach Island, between Novaya Zemyla and the mainland. These suggests hunting activity there in the second millennium BCE. The island was long believed in Nenet mythology to be a sacred island, with two sacrificial idols on the north and south coast.
If Arctic mobility was therefore possible in the Mesolithic, involving long stretches of travel across featureless ice bridges and plateaus, then there is a very real chance that Svalbard would have been accessible, if not from Norway then from Novaya Zemlya, Zhokov Island and probably Greenland as well. Christiansson and Simonsen argued as much in 1970, claiming that the Svalbard flint-tool makers would have travelled across frozen stretches of the Barents and Kara sea.
In support of this is a genetic closeness between the native Svalbard reindeer and the Peary Caribou, which is found in Nunavut and islands in the Northwest Territory of Canada. Much like the warrah I discussed in my previous article on pre-Colombian settlement on the Falkland Islands, a relatively recent common ancestor dwelling somewhere between the two areas, perhaps on Greenland, may have been driven to Svalbard by hunter-gatherers around 4500 BP. However, the reindeer could instead have migrated there entirely by chance, looking for patches of vegetation or fleeing from roaming polar bears.
With no evidence for settlement or human activity beyond a few dubious flints and a spurious genetic link between two reindeer species that might have come about naturally, it's probably safer to say that the Svalbard archipelago was uninhabited until the arrival of the Pomors and the Dutch. Again, like the evidence for the Falkland Islands, bands of hunter-gatherers, coming from the Independence I communities in Greenland or the Paleo-Siberian communities on the Russian mainland, could have visited the islands, but being so far away from sources of raw materials, their activities would have been limited to seal-hunting and making tents that could have been carried on sleds or on their backs. The climate of Svalbard is ideal for archaeological remains, so anything more substantial would have already been found.
References:
Albrethsen, S. E., & Arlov, T. B. (1988). The discovery of Svalbard–a problem reconsidered. Fennoscandia archaeologica, 5, 105-110.
Bjerck, H. B. (2000). Stone Age settlement on Svalbard? A re-evaluation of previous finds and the results of a recent field survey. Polar Record, 36(197), 97-112.
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