Knowledge from the ancient sea – a long-term perspective of human impact on aquatic life in Mesolithic Scandinavia

Abstract

Lately, evidence for early-Holocene emerging sedentism has been suggested among foragers in Northern Europe. The core of this suggested sedentism lies in the increasing dependency on large-scale fishing and mass consumption of fish and a territorial behaviour associated with access to the best fishing locations. This territoriality might also be associated with increasing numbers of people settling and living in Northern Europe at this time. In this article, we review the evidence for forager sedentism and territoriality and relate it to large-scale fishing, during a time of global warming, in early-Holocene Scandinavia. We explore the requisites of using the archaeological record to study the long-term effect of intense fishing on some of the best-preserved Stone Age sites in the area of study. We suggest that the archaeological record can enable a discussion of how aquatic life varies corresponding to human exploitation and climate change. In addition, we discuss how these changes might be traceable through temporal fluctuations in species composition, within species size reduction/increases, temporal fish age changes and within species dietary changes. In the end, we suggest that the archaeological record holds one of the keys to predict future impact on life below the surface, by offering a long-term perspective on aquatic exploitation in a period of climate change. At the same time as we acknowledge the potential hidden in the archaeological record, we also raise the dire warning that this record might be rapidly disappearing, because of an accelerated deterioration of archaeological organic remains in areas previously known for their good preservation.

Human encroachment, climate change and the loss of our archaeological organic cultural heritage: Accelerated bone deterioration at Ageröd, a revisited Scandinavian Mesolithic key-site in despair

“…Organic archives are important for our current knowledge of past human activities and cultures and, indeed, of the environment itself [ 48 , 49 ]. The Mesolithic site Ageröd has been one such archive, were nearly optimal conditions have left a glimpse into the organic material humans used and interacted with, some nine millennia ago.…”

Quantifying archaeo-organic degradation – A multiproxy approach to understand the accelerated deterioration of the ancient organic cultural heritage at the Swedish Mesolithic site Ageröd

“…By investigating the soil chemical properties and by relating them to bone histological analyses, collagen preservation and the palaeobotany at the site, questions of how organic preservation has changed during the last seven decades and what might have caused the changes are answered and discussed. The present study shall be viewed as a part of investigating the prerequisites for the future survival of our long-term archaeo-environmental archive of climatic and environmental changes and/or its relation to past human cultural interaction [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9], in a time when reports of ongoing and accelerated destruction of this valuable record emerge from all over the world [1,[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. settlements where section A, C and HC intersect one settlement and Ageröd I:B and I:D intersects two others [25].…”

Early Holocene Scandinavian foragers on a journey to affluence: Mesolithic fish exploitation, seasonal abundance and storage investigated through strontium isotope ratios by laser ablation (LA‐MC-ICP‐MS)

“…e.g. [ 19 , 41 , 47 ] and is supported by evidence of large populations among the Late Mesolithic south Scandinavian foraging communities of the Ertebølle culture [ 61 ].…”

“…The Mesolithic period is known for its diversification of subsistence strategies and resources [26,27], and a large species diversity is often encountered on Mesolithic sites that have favourable preservation of organic remains [28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. In recent years, the importance of fish in Scandinavian Mesolithic societies has been highlighted [19,[35][36][37][38][39], with an inferred important role in a suggested regionalization and territorialization of the Scandinavian Mesolithic landscape PLOS ONE [19,40,41]. New collations of European fish bone records show that the quantity of identified fish bones from Sweden, Denmark and Norway combined amounts to roughly two-thirds of the entire Mesolithic European fish bone assemblage [42], again highlighting the importance of fish and its impact on early northern foraging communities.…”

“…However, even with a methodological bias, the fish bone record from northern Europe highlights the importance of fish to the Mesolithic people, even more so when other evidence is considered, such as fishing nets, traps and weirs [43][44][45][46], hooks, netting needles and sinkers [47][48][49][50], and boats, paddles and other indirect indications of watercraft [51][52][53][54][55][56]. This strong relationship with aquatic exploitation has led to the suggestion that humans exploited their local aquatic environments to such a large degree that it had already affected aquatic species composition and abundance in the Early Holocene [41].…”