Mammoth-hunter Camps in the Scandinavian North Sea Sector during the Late Weichselian?

Abstract

Until recently, the general view of archaeologists was that southern Scandinavia was uninhabited during the last ice age, the Weichselian glaciation. It was thought that humans arriving from south would have met a wall of ice if they tried to penetrate into the area. Recent climate reconstructions and glaciological data, combined with recent faunal finds from the adjacent North Sea sector, promote the idea of a much more moderate and prosperous landscape with large, now submerged, plains accessible. Then this paper argues that large parts of the South Scandinavian North Sea sector were actually inhabitable during most of this glacial period, with extensive ice-free coastal zones even during the Last Glacial Maximum. It is difficult to believe that humans, already well-documented in the adjacent land areas, should not have known to inhabit and exploit such a rich resource zone. In addition to the paleoenvironmental data, ethnoarchaeological evidence is used to document that it was no problem for humans to kill large animals such as mammoths as some researchers have maintained. Furthermore, findings from excavations of mammoth-hunter sites, are used to argue that the large quantities of megafaunal remains fished up from the North Sea in recent years should be seriously considered as representing settlement material associated with mammoth-hunter camps dating from the second half of the Weichsel Glacial Stage. The central question is whether these North Sea faunal remains represent sites similar to the mammoth-hunter camps known from other parts of Europe and from Siberia? If that is the case, the Cultural Heritage management is confronted with a hitherto unrecognised problem.