A Natural Time-Capsule

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Melting Glacier in the Italian Alps Reveals Trove of World War I Artifacts

Excavations at the summit of Mount Scorluzzo offer rare glimpse into lives of soldiers fighting in the White War

By David Kindy

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
MAY 11, 2021

A retreating glacier in the Italian Alps is revealing a forgotten world sealed in an icy tomb for more than a century. As Dharna Noor reports for Gizmodo, archaeologists excavating a mountaintop bunker used by the Austro-Hungarian army have unearthed a trove of World War I–era artifacts left behind by Alpine troops who fought Italian soldiers in sub-zero conditions at roughly 10,000 feet above sea level.

Items found at the site include coins, lanterns, canned foods, bottles, clothes, letters, straw beds and animal bones, reports Angela Giuffrida for the Guardian. Built in a cave on top of Mount Scorluzzo, near the Swiss border, the barracks—now part of Stelvio National Park—offer a rare glimpse into the lives of the frostbitten soldiers who fought in the White War, a series of high-altitude battles that took place across the Alps between 1915 and 1918.

“The barracks [are] a time capsule of the White War that [help] us to understand the extreme, starving conditions that the soldiers experienced,” Stefano Morosini, a historian at the national park, tells the Guardian. “The knowledge we’re able to gather today from the relics is a positive consequence of the negative fact of climate change.”

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