No abstract

ABSTRACT. Within a project on Stone Age sites of NE Germany, 26 burials from the Ostorf cemetery and some further Neolithic sites have been analyzed by more than 40 accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates. We here present the results of stable isotope and radiocarbon measurements together with reference 14

Chance discoveries of weapons, horse bones and human skeletal remains along the banks of the River Tollense led to a campaign of research which has identified them as the debris from a Bronze Age battle. The resources of war included horses, arrowheads and wooden clubs, and the dead had suffered blows indicating face-to-face combat. This surprisingly modern and decidedly vicious struggle took place over the swampy braided streams of the river in an area of settled, possibly coveted, territory. Washed along by the current, the bodies and weapons came to rest on a single alluvial surface.

The border between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic in Central Europe is traditionally defined on the basis of subsistence strategy. It is the development from hunter-gatherer groups in the forests of the early Holocene to the first farmers. The debate on the character of this process has been going on for over 100 years. This chapter presents results of new research on this subject, with an emphasis on northern Germany.

We investigate the landscape development of the early Mesolithic hunter-gatherer sites of Duvensee (10000–6500 cal. BCE). Based on ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and geoarchaeological drillings, we present for the first time a three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of the palaeoenvironment of 63 ha covering subarea of the former lake during the Mesolithic. The archaeological aims were (1) to detect the location of former islands possibly hosting hunter-gatherer settlements and (2) to reconstruct the ancient landscape development for understanding prehistoric land use. The research in Duvensee lasts almost 100 years, providing vivid illustrations of early Mesolithic life. Clusters of Mesolithic camps have been found located on small sand hills that formed islands in the prehistoric lake. For this environment, we present depth maps of the three most important sedimentary facies interfaces of the ancient Lake Duvensee. Interface1 represents the transition between coarse organic sediments (peat and coarse detritus gyttja) and fine-grained organic sediments (fine detritus gyttja, calcareous gyttja), Interface2 represents the transition to the underlying clayish-loamy sediments, and Interface3 marks the top of the basal sand deposits at the lake bottom. From Interface3, we identified the location and extent of five former islands with Mesolithic camps. Stratigraphic information from the corings enabled us to create a 3D model of the spatio-temporal development of the Duvensee bog. The locations of the islands and their estimated dive-up times agree with the spatio-temporal pattern of the previous archaeological finds. The model shows where hunter-gatherers could settle and move from one island to another following the shorelines of the overgrowing lake. The 3D stratigraphic model provides growth and shrinking rates of the island and lake areas in the Mesolithic, and volumes of organic and non-organic deposited lake sediments. Besides, it provides a basis for a sustainable groundwater management needed for heritage preservation.

Highlightsd Yersinia pestis is discovered in a 5,000-year-old huntergatherer from Latvia d Y. pestis emerged 7,000 years ago at the beginning of the Neolithic d The infected individual might represent a case of septicemic plague due to zoonosis

No abstract

The ancient lake Duvensee in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, is one of the prime locations in northern Europe for early Holocene research. Archaeological sites on the former lakeshore provide vivid illustrations of early Mesolithic life, with bark mats and other organic finds preserved, including evidence for the extensive use of hazelnuts. Although the area has been the subject of research for almost 100 years, a coherent summary of these discoveries has not yet been written. Here we review past research at Duvensee, and give some prospects for further research. We show that the Duvensee sites varied in their structure and chronology. While only a limited number of sites can be connected to hazelnut exploitation, some of them show signs of hafting and retooling and other domestic activities. At a few sites, specific hearths were excavated which can be connected with hazelnut roasting and other subsistence activities. Finally, we show that while most earlier studies focused almost exclusively on archaeological research questions, Duvensee has the potential to reveal not only transformations in human behaviour, but also environmental changes at a detailed scale; we therefore argue for a more holistic perspective and multidisciplinary approach to reconstructing prehistoric landscapes and cultural transformations.