Modelling the Earliest Human Settlement in the Kattegat-Skagerrak Circumference

Descrizione del progetto

Sulle tracce dei primi colonizzatori della Scandinavia

Cosa sappiamo dei primi esseri umani che si insediarono lungo le mutevoli coste dei mari Kattegat e Skagerrak? I cambiamenti nel livello del mare, il ritiro dei ghiacciai e i dati archeologici frammentari hanno reso difficile ottenere informazioni al riguardo. Sostenuto dal programma di azioni Marie Skłodowska-Curie, il progetto MESK riunisce ricercatori provenienti da Danimarca, Norvegia e Svezia al fine di far luce sul modo in cui i primi esseri umani si siano adattati ai drastici cambiamenti ambientali in uno dei paesaggi preistorici più dinamici d’Europa. Il team impiegherà metodi computazionali riproducibili e set di dati panregionali con l’obiettivo di migliorare le tecniche di datazione, mappare i primi modelli di insediamento costiero e applicare analisi quantitative agli utensili in pietra per identificare le differenze culturali.

Obiettivo

Modelling the Earliest Human Settlement in the Kattegat-Skagerrak Circumference (MESK) is an interdisciplinary project that will investigate the earliest human settlement along the coastline of Kattegat and Skagerrak in present-day Denmark, Sweden and Norway. This will be done by addressing three fundamental challenges that currently hamper our understanding of the earliest peopling of Scandinavia: (1) Chronological control pertaining to the deposition of the archaeological material, (2) variability in coastal engagement and settlement patterns in regions of varying topography, characterised by dramatic changes due to deglaciation and sea-level change, and (3) the degree to which lithic artefacts associated with the settlements are indicative of cultural differences within the region. Due both to research-historical circumstance and modern organisation of the research sectors, our understanding of the Late Glacial and Early Holocene human dispersal and settlement of Scandinavia continue to be influenced by present-day national and administrative borders. To overcome this issue, MESK will involve the application of reproducible computational methods to pan-regional datasets with the research objectives of (1) analysing coastal settlement patterns relative to the contemporaneous shoreline to assess the coverage and reliability of the archaeological dating method shoreline dating, and (2) employ quantitative methods to taxonomically classify lithic armatures that have traditionally been described qualitatively to define archaeological cultures that are discretely bound in time and space. The project is uniquely positioned to provide a nuanced understanding of how people of the deep past settled in previously uninhabited regions, how they adapted to an at times dramatic sea-level change and will provide researchers concerned with similar questions with tools for implementing shoreline dating, thereby improving our chronological grasp on these key processes of our past.