Establishment of new methodologies for archaeological prospection and investigation of hunter gatherer settlements on submerged coastlines.

The focus of WP3 is to provide data on hunter gatherer settlement concentrating on the former coastal regions and develop methods to identify them.   

Coastlines are typically resource rich areas and likely to have been attractive to Mesolithic hunter gatherers. But the early Mesolithic coastlines in southern Scandinavia are rather inaccessible at depths that are typically not explored by divers. Our knowledge of this key settlement zone is therefore extremely sparse, and little is known about what role they played for people.   

For SUBNORDICA, WP3 will provide data from some of the oldest known (and accessible) coastal sites in southern Scandinavia. These sites are central to debates about the emergence of coastally adapted societies and human responses to sea-level changes.   

In WP3, sites will be mapped and excavated to determine when people began to exploit marine resources and to consider how widespread coastal sites were. New excavations will be undertaken in Aarhus Bay, which has recently been shown to contain a well-preserved landscape and traces of an 8500-year-old Mesolithic settlement at a depth of c. 8 m.  

One of the main goals for investigating the site is to clarify whether or not the people who lived there relied on marine resources. The upcoming excavations will recover a large assemblage of faunal material from this Early Mesolithic coastal settlement. Hopefully, these animal remains can be used both to create a detailed understanding of the role of coastal areas in the subsistence economy of this period and reveal the fishing and other procurement methods that were employed. For example, had the well-documented fish fences and traps known from the Late Mesolithic their roots in the Maglemose period? (And were those people on the coasts more sedentary compared to people known from the inland areas?).  

WP3 also seeks to use the known submerged Stone Age sites in Aarhus Bay to develop and test new methods and technologies to identify Stone Age sites that are exposed on the seabed with the help of machine learning/AI. The results from WP3 will provide an insight into the nature of evidence likely to be encountered in deeper waters elsewhere. It will contribute to the synergistic modelling of Mesolithic inhabitation for use in deep water prospection and will be used to determine the archaeological potential of other areas and target future survey work.