ABSTRACT
The farm known as Evenhus stands on the peninsula of Frosta where it juts furthest out into the Trondheim Fjord. To reach it involves a two-hour journey by train and bus from Trondheim on the west coast of Norway. Past the farm orchard, in a fringe of fir wood looking down a gentle slope to the fjord, is one of the great galleries of marine prehistoric art. Carved into a rock-face there are a curvetting whale and a whole series of boats, some of them decorated with symbols but all of them a very particular type (see Figure 4.2). The other two main sites where carvings like this can be seen, Skjomen in Ofoten and Rødøy in Helgeland, are not at all easy to get at but Evenhus, even without signposts, is not hard to find. No nautical archaeologist can look at these carvings unmoved. If not as beautiful as the Minoan seal-stones, they are much larger and easier to study and much clearer than the ship carvings at Hal Tarxien on Malta. One sees in bold outline the craft in which prehistoric man in the Postglacial period braved the often violent seas of the coasts and skerries of Norway and worked his way as far north as Finnmark. Rock carving of a skin boat from Evenhus, Norway (author) https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315800332/6e4eb99f-3cc9-4dc7-bf47-9d9a920a90c1/content/fig9_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
