Kjel Knutsson

The first eastern migrations of people and knowledge into Scandinavia : evidence from studies of Mesolithic technology, 9th-8th millennium BC

In this paper a team of Scandinavian researchers identifies and describes a Mesolithic technological concept, referred to as ‘the conical core pressure blade’ concept, and investigates how this concept spread into Fennoscandia and across Scandinavia. Using lithic technological, contextual archaeological and radiocarbon analyses, it is demonstrated that this blade concept arrived with ‘post-Swiderian’ hunter-gatherer groups from the Russian plain into northern Fennoscandia and the eastern Baltic during the 9th millennium bc. From there it was spread by migrating people and/or as transmitted knowledge through culture contacts into interior central Sweden, Norway and down along the Norwegian coast. However it was also spread into southern Scandinavia, where it was formerly identified as the Maglemosian technogroup 3 (or the ‘Sværdborg phase’). In this paper it is argued that the identification and spread of the conical core pressure blade concept represents the first migration of people, technology and ideas into Scandinavia from the south-eastern Baltic region and the Russian plain.

‘Simple’ need not mean ‘archaic’

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Lithic Raw Material Economy in the Mesolithic: An Experimental Test of Edged Tool Efficiency and Durability in Bone Tool Production

ABSTRACT The foundation of this paper is lithic economy with a focus on the actual use of different lithic raw materials for tasks at hand. Our specific focus is on the production of bone tools during the Mesolithic. The lithic and osseous assemblages from Strandvägen, Motala, in east-central Sweden provide the archaeological background for the study. Based on a series of experiments we evaluate the efficiency and durability of different tool edges of five lithic raw materials: Cambrian flint, Cretaceous flint, mylonitic quartz, quartz, and porphyry, each used to whittle bone. The results show that flint is the most efficient of the raw materials assessed. Thus, a non-local raw material offers complements of functional characteristics for bone working compared to locally available quartz and mylonitic quartz. This finding provides a new insight into lithic raw material distribution in the region, specifically for bone tool production on site.

Comment on Ingela Bergman: Indigenous Time, Colonial History: Sami Conceptions of Time and Ancestry and the Role of Relics in Cultural Reproduction. Norwegian Archaeological Review 39, 151–161

It is argued that 17th century reconstructed Saami world view cannot unquestioned be used to interpret cultural processes several thousand years back in time in northern Fennoscandia.