Modelling the Earliest Human Settlement in the Kattegat-Skagerrak Circumference

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.