The Rock carvings at Alta, dating from c. 4200 BC to 500 BC, are on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites. The Komsa culture was named after the Komsa mountain in Alta municipality, where the first archeological remains of this culture were discovered.
In the aftermath of the Sami Kautokeino rebellion of 1852, rebel leaders Mons Aslaksen Somby and Aslak Jacobsen H�tta were decapitated at Elvebakken in Alta, on October 14, 1854.
Their bodies were buried in graves just outside the K�fjord church graveyard in Alta, but their heads were sent on to the Anatomisk Institute at the Kong Medical Frederiks University in Oslo, where they were kept for more than a century as part of the university's skull collections. The two skulls were only relinqinished by the university in 1985, following a controversy and protests by Sami activists, and were in November 1997 buried at the K�fjord Church in Alta, at the same spot as their bodies were buried over one-hundred and forty years earlier.
In World War II, the German battleship Tirpitz used K�fjord, an arm of Altafjord, as a harbor, and was damaged here by attacking allied warplanes.
Altasaken in 1979 made headlines for weeks, as many people (especially Sami people and environmentalists) demonstrated and used civil disobedience to prevent the building of a dam in order to produce hydropower. The dam was built, however, and the river still offers good salmon fishing. The king of Norway usually visits the river once in the summer to fish.
Alta became a city (town) in 1999. The population has been growing steadily for many years
