Alta Rock Art

More than 6,000 carvings have been found around Alta since the first were noticed in 1973, the largest concentration at Jiepmaluokta, five kilometres from town, now an open-air museum. Shoreline dating puts the earliest at around 4200 BC and the last at about 500 BC, nearly five thousand years of work by the same coast, and a 2010 reassessment pushed the oldest phase back another thousand years. The images show hunter-gatherers who managed reindeer herds, built boats, fished, and practised shamanistic rituals involving bear worship. Listed by UNESCO in 1985, it is Norway’s only prehistoric World Heritage Site.