Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Transition to Agriculture in Southern Scandinavia

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With National Science Foundation support Mr. Kurt Gron will analyze late Mesolithic and early Neolithic animal remains from several sites of the northern European Ertebølle (5400-4000 B.C.) and Trichterbecher (4000-3500 B.C.) cultures of Southern Scandinavia. Analyses will be performed under the supervision of Dr. T. Douglas Price and involve materials from a cluster of excavated sites located in northwest Zealand, Denmark, as well as a transitional shell midden in eastern Jutland, Denmark, and will include previously published data. The fundamental goal of the research is to gain insight into the factors which, in traditional societies, either promote change or resistance to it. Southern Scandinavia, appears to illustrate the latter and the proposed research hopefully will increase scientific understanding of the inhibitory factors involved. The adoption of domesticated animals and plants in Scandinavia was one of the last transitions to agriculture in Europe, around 4000 B.C. For nearly a millennium prior, farming was present in Europe but not southern Scandinavia, and there was contact between foraging and farming groups without an adoption of farming by Ertebølle foragers. After this delay, agriculture began, but in an idiosyncratic fashion. This was characterized by the rapid introduction of domesticated animals and plants but their low importance subsequently for nearly half a millennium, large-scale environmental changes, and culture change in the form of new types of ceramic and settlement system concurrent with some evidence of cultural continuity. Despite the long history of archaeological inquiry into the origins of agriculture in southern Scandinavia, a consensus view of the causes, timeline, and the people involved remains elusive. Questions as complicated as explaining the origins of agriculture require robust data sets of not only the transitional era, but also antecedent periods. Due to the scant archaeological record of the earliest farmers in Denmark, a clear understanding of the transition may be best understood by studying the Ertebølle culture and their faunal economies. By applying several methods and integrating this data with other scholarship, Mr. Gron will tie together past and present research, introducing new types of analysis and models of variability which will inform future research. These analyses will focus on geographical and regional variability in Ertebølle animal use just prior to the onset of farming in the region, and will build and test a model of variability within such animal economies. The study of animal bones is particularly important in Stone-Age research, as faunal remains are one of the most robust data sets available for study of such cultures. Gron will use multiple approaches, including traditional zooarchaeological, chemical, and statistical methods to understand the build-up, and transition to, agriculture in Denmark through the lens of faunal use.Methods applied here will inform and be applicable for understanding agricultural origins and transitions worldwide, one of the key questions of human history. This research will provide high-level and unique training for Mr. Gron and will foster long-term transatlantic Stone-Age research and scholarly cooperation, as this project relies on collaboration with a number of Danish and other European scholars and students. Publication will be submitted for peer-review, and results will be presented at scholarly conferences as well as to the general public. As the relationship of humans with animals is a key trait our kind, further understanding the interaction between people and their natural environment is perpetually relevant.