Dissertation: The Late Mesolithic Puzzle: Population Decline or Settlement Reconfiguraion?

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Under the direction of Dr. Michael Jochim, MS Susan Harris will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. The goal of her research is to understand changes in population size during the Mesolithic period in Southwestern Germany. Approximately 10,500 years ago, after the northward retreat of the ice sheets Stone Age foragers across most of Europe developed new types of "microlithic" stone tools and shifted their focus from hunting large animals (which decreased in number as tundra/grassland gave way to boreal forests) to smaller species. Archaeologists believe that the specialized adaptations which developed culminated in the Neolithic Revolution in which plants and animals were first domesticated. During the Mesolithic population apparently increased and this put stress on available food sources thus setting the stage for agricultural innovation. Within this broad context Southwestern Germany stands as an anomaly because apparently some areas were abandoned and others evidence decreased population during Late Mesolithic times. MS Harris wishes to determine whether this pattern is, in fact, real. Because most researchers in this region have focused on well excavated assemblages and ignored more abundant surface sites, MS Harris will analyze this under-utilized data class. She notes that relatively little attention has been paid to these materials because of the difficulties in assigning them to time period. The microlithic tool types which characterize the Late Mesolithic normally form only a small percentage of assemblages and thus, she believes, relevant surface sites may go unrecognized. In preliminary work she has studied well dated materials from securely stratified sites and believes that the Early and Late Mesolithic can be distinguished not only by typology but also be the technology used to manufacture tools. These technological criteria can be applied to sites lacking in diagnostic tool types. With National Science Foundation support she will further refine this analytic approach. She will then conduct a survey to complement prior work in the region and classify sites collected by herself as well as others to assign them to time period. With these data she will then plot site distributions by age and microhabitat to determine density and trace changes over time.The Mesolithic sets the stage for the Neolithic Revolution and the rise of complex society. For this reason it is an important area for scientific research and MS Harris work will not only shed light on one anomalous geographic region but also, hopefully, provide an analytic approach of more general use. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist.