Intentional fire management in the Holocene with emphasis on hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic in South Norway

The geographical and altitudinal distribution of the data from 68 palynological sites has allowed the synthesis of a relationship between the microscopic charcoal curves and people over time. Most of the selected sites were of archaeological interest. Quantitative methods, qualitative methods and topics about the relation between fire, charcoal, nature and people in a forested landscape were used. Palynological sites are better suited to revealing fire management activities in the Mesolithic than archaeological sites because intentional burning of vegetation was carried out in areas related to lakes and mires. Climate is ruled out as the cause of the charcoal occurrence because there are no correlations between inferred regional climatic changes and the charcoal. This suggests that an anthropogenic explanation for the charcoal occurrence is the most plausible.There are many indications that hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic used fire management and that fire was an important part of cultural practice associated with settlement, population density and resource needs. Fire management was a common and regular work task integrated with other activities. The traditional lifestyle of foragers may have included customary controlled burning practices as a part of manipulating the ecological succession and the modification of vegetation communities. Burning may have been central to hunting and gathering practices and the key to many social and cultural activities. The timing of burns may have been related to weather conditions, time of year and annual cultural events.The different pattern of temporal changes in charcoal abundance suggests that no widespread burning (i.e. on a regional or landscape-scale) had taken place. The anthropogenic burning was different from natural fires. The fires set by people were smaller and less intense. Selected areas of vegetation were burnt on a recurrent basis. They were predictable, almost immediately productive, creating mosaics in a complex pattern of vegetation of burnt and unburnt patches. Because they reduced available fuel, they provided protection against the disruptions of natural fires. The occurrence of natural fires is irregular, often with long intervals in between; they are uncontrolled, unpredictable, destructive to the vegetation and potentially dangerous for people. In order for the recorded charcoal occurrences to be considered the result of natural fires, sites close to each other should have had similar charcoal occurrences, but this is not the case. An often low and continuous charcoal presence in a more or less dense forest in the Mesolithic indicates a continuous production of charcoal, which is better interpreted as people’s use of fire than continuous natural fires. The data confirm that anthropogenic fires were much more frequent than natural fires in the Mesolithic. Foragers did not simply adjust to their environment, but had an active, dynamic relationship with nature, using intentional burning both to modify and to maintain the environment. Intentional burning of vegetation during the Mesolithic is suggested to have been enacted by foragers who controlled fire for many purposes and widened its application to preserve their basis of existence, for instance to improve the outcome of hunting and for communication. Two periods with a high frequency of maximum values of charcoal in the pollen diagrams are recorded in the early (9800–6000 cal yr BP) and the late part of the Holocene (younger than 2400 cal yr BP), respectively, and not at the transition to the Neolithic. This shows that early farmers did not produce as much charcoal—measured in maxima—as the huntergatherers did before the transition to the Neolithic, and confirms foragers’ intentional burning as part of Mesolithic land-use in South Norway. The first occurrences and high frequency of maximum values of charcoal pre-date the transition to the Neolithic and thus it can be ruled out that they were correlated with agrarian cultures in South Norway. It is possible that the selective burning carried out by foragers in vegetation paved the way for pioneer farmers to convert land for agricultural purposes. In that sense, the neolithisation was not very revolutionary, as the knowledge of using fire to manipulate and open the forest had a long pre-agrarian history. As the path of the charcoal curve following the transition to the Neolithic is often interpreted as the result of forest clearance by farmers, a fire-related woodland change interpretation for the Mesolithic might also be used. After the transition to the Neolithic, the density of the forest in many areas decreased and allowed more charcoal deposition. The density of the forest affected the charcoal curve resulting in low values before the transition to theNeolithic compared to the values after the transition. This is a strong indication that the charcoal curve during the Mesolithic mainly originated as an effect of human activities. That the density of the forest in the Mesolithic changed more than the traditionally accepted view is probably the result of intentional fire management.

Bronze Age and Early Iron Age house and settlement development at Forsandmoen, south-western Norway - Tables and Figures

Table 5, Table 23, Table 35, Table 36, Table 37, Table 38, Table 41, Table 42, Table 45 and Fig. 4.

Bronze Age and Early Iron Age house and settlement development at Forsandmoen, south-western Norway

The ambition of this monograph is to analyse a limited number of topics regarding house types and thus social and economic change from the extensive material that came out of the archaeological excavation that took place at Forsandmoen (“Forsand plain”), Forsand municipality, Rogaland, Norway during the decade 1980–1990, as well as the years 1992, 1995 and 2007. The excavation was organised as an interdisciplinaryresearch project within archaeology, botany (palynological analysis from bogs and soils, macrofossil analysis) and phosphate analysis, conducted by staff from the Museum of Archaeology in Stavanger (as it was called until 2009, now part of the University of Stavanger). A large phosphate survey project had demarcaded a 20 ha settlement area, among which 9 ha were excavated using mechanical topsoil stripping to expose thehabitation traces at the top of the glaciofluvial outwash plain of Forsandmoen. A total of 248 houses could be identified by archaeological excavations, distributed among 17 house types. In addition, 26 partly excavated houses could not be classified into a type. The extensive house material comprises three types of longhouses, of which there are as many as 30–40 in number, as well as four other longhouse types, of which there are only 2–7 in number. There were nine other house types, comprising partly small dwelling houses and partly storage houses, of which there were 3–10 in number. Lastly, there are 63 of the smallest storage house, consisting of only four postholes in a square shape. A collection of 264 radiocarbon dates demonstrated that the settlement was established in the last part of the 15th century BC and faded out during the 7th–8th century AD, encompassing the Nordic Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. As a number of houses comprising four of the house types were excavated with the same methods in the same area by the same staff, it is a major goal of this monograph to analyse thoroughly the different featuresof the houses (postholes, wall remains, entrances, ditches, hearths, house-structure, find-distribution) and how they were combined and changed into the different house types through time. House material from different Norwegian areas as well as Sweden, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands is included in comparative analyses to reveal connections within the Nordic area. Special attention has been given to theinterpretation of the location of activity areas in the dwelling and byre sections in the houses, as well as the life expectancy of the two main longhouse types. Based on these analyses, I have presented a synthesis in 13 phases of the development of the settlement from Bronze Age Period II to the Merovingian Period. This analysis shows that, from a restricted settlement consisting of one or two small farms in the Early BronzeAge, it increases slightly throughout the Late Bronze Age to 2–3 solitary farms to a significantly larger settlement consisting of 3–4 larger farms in the Pre-Roman Iron Age. From the beginning of the early Roman Iron Age, the settlement seems to increase to 8–9 even larger farms, and through the late Roman Iron Age, the settlement increases to 12–13 such farms, of which 6–7 farms are located so close together that they would seem to be a nucleated or village settlement. In the beginning of the Migration Period, there were 16–17 farms, each consisting of a dwelling/byre longhouse and a workshop, agglomerated in an area of 300 x 200 m where the farms are arranged in four E–W oriented rows. In addition, two farms were situated 140 m NE of the main settlement. At the transition to the Merovingian Period, radiocarbon dates show that all but two of the farms were suddenly abandoned. At the end of that period, the Forsandmoen settlement was completely abandoned. The abandonment could have been caused by a combination of circumstances such as overexploitation in agriculture, colder climate, the Plague of Justinian or the collapse of the redistributive chiefdom system due to the breakdown of the Roman Empire. The abrupt abandonment also coincides with a huge volcanic eruption or cosmic event that clouded the sun around the whole globe in AD 536–537. It is argued that the climatic effect on the agriculture at this latitude could induce such a serious famine that the settlement, in combination with the other possible causes, was virtually laid waste during the ensuing cold decade AD 537–546.

Bremen’s trade with the North Atlantic, c. 1400–1700

There is little evidence of Bremen merchants in Norway before the royal charters issued from 1279 onwards, even though Bremen had been the seat of the missionary archbishop for the Nordic countries since the ninth century. Trade in Bergen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was dominated by the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic Sea coast led by merchants from Lübeck. Despite opposition from Hanseatic merchants sailing to Bergen, merchants from Hamburg and Bremen developed new trading posts to barter cod on Iceland and Shetland in the fifteenth century. Traders from Hamburg and Bremen on Iceland competed for licences issued by the Danish king. The 1558 debt register of a merchant from Bremen in Kumbaravogur provides considerable insight into this trade. The Danish king restricted sailings to Iceland to Danish merchants from 1601. On Shetland the Scottish foud allotted landing places to foreign skippers and traders. Merchants from Bremen became respected members of the island communities and in the seventeenth century they changed to trading in herring. Several tariff rate rises led to the end of Bremen sailings to Shetland by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Bremen merchants in Norway succeeded in breaking the Lübeck dominance in Bergen in the sixteenth century. By 1600, other Norwegian harbours in the North Atlantic, notably Stavanger, were also destinations for ships from Bremen.

Ships and their timber source as indicators of connections between regions

The precise dating and determination of the source of timbers in shipwrecks found around the coasts of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, through dendrochronology allows us to see connections between north and south, east and west throughout the region and to a high chronological precision. In this paper we take a look at results of recent analyses of timber from ships, and timber and barrel cargoes, to try to draw a chronological picture, from the twelfth to seventeenth centuries, of links between regions, through transport in oak ships and trade of timber. Archaeological finds of oak from timber cargos in shipwrecks and fine art objects (painted panels and sculpture) show the extent to which timber was shipped from Hanseatic towns along the southern Baltic coast, to western and north-western Europe.

The North Atlantic trade with Iceland, Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes and the policy of the Hanseatic Diet (1369–1535)

This paper explores the limits of the Hanseatic Diet’s ability to regulate Hanseatic trade with Iceland and the North Atlantic island groups of Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes*. It comes to the conclusion that the Hanseatic Diets prohibited direct commercial links to Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes consistently from 1416, but turned a blind eye to the Iceland trade. The reasons for this inconsistent policy were the necessity of maintaining the Bergen’s monopoly on the stockfish trade (which was also in the interest of the Danish-Norwegian crown), while at the same time keeping the door open for Hanseatic merchants who were not active in the Bergen trade to forge commercial links with Iceland, albeit at their own risk. The representatives of the Hanseatic towns often preferred to leave an issue undecided, in order to keep as many options open as possible. The huge divergence in the interests of merchants and towns forced the Diet to dissemble, pursuing policies out of the public gaze which subverted the resolutions the Diet had passed for public consumption.

Comment: Interdisciplinarity? A definite maybe

The problems of undertaking interdisciplinary research, particularly in the fields of history and archaeology are considered. A series of five issues are identified which make it difficult to integrate studies from these two areas: knowledge mismatch, a mismatch of chronologies, an inability to match types of information, problems of the scale of study and issues around the maturity of the disciplines. Each discipline tends to enforce the particularities of its own vision, training students to its perspective and perpetuating the differences. Interdisciplinary is not, however, a doomed pursuit, and is likely to be most successful when there are clear and immediate benefits for all the parties.

Low German influence on the Scandinavian languages in late medieval times – some comments on loan words, word-forming, syntactic structures and names

There was a strong influence from the Low German language on the languages in Scandinavia in late medieval times due to the considerable economical and cultural contact and interaction between northern Germany and the Scandinavian countries in this period, especially the Hanse trade. The vocabulary was especially affected, but also the grammatical structure and names. Some place-names from south-western Norway seem to reflect Low German influence. The loans from Low German are well integrated and adjusted to the structure of the Scandinavian languages.

The ships that headed north - an archaeological perspective

Information on ships that were used for the North Atlantic trade, mainly from Hamburg and Bremen, is scarce and, to date, has been completely derived from historical documents. This is problematic because the terms used for ship types do not represent technical definitions. As there is currently no direct archaeological evidence for the ships that headed north, finds of ships and ship timbers from other areas had been considered to offer a first glance into shipbuilding and the mechanisms of change in building methods. Two main building methods can be distinguished in the medieval period for sea-going and coastal craft: the bottom-based Bremen-type shipbuilding method and clinker shipbuilding methods. The new carvel shipbuilding method was established in the late fifteenth century in north-west Europe. The archaeological evidence shows that there was no immediate change over but that in many cases, there was instead a convergence to achieve flush carvel-built hulls. Considering the Bremen-type with its flat bottom and limited sailing abilities and the fact that the German merchants only started to participate in the North Atlantic trade in the late fifteenth century, the question arises of whether there were other technical issues that prevented them from this enterprise until they managed to gain the knowledge required to build ocean-going vessels that could withstand a journey of several weeks across the North Sea and Norwegian Sea.

Gautavik - a trading site in Iceland re-examined

Gautavík is a well-known archaeological site on the east coast of Iceland. It was partially excavated in 1979 and interpreted as a seasonal occupied trading site, abandoned shortly after c. 1500. However, recent archaeological research on the excavated ceramics, which hitherto had not been studied in detail, raised doubts about the interpretation regarding the dating and function of the site. New research was then initiated that included an investigation of written documents in the archives of Bremen, Hamburg, and Copenhagen, pertaining to the trade with Iceland during the sixteenth century. On the basis of the new results presented here we now interpret Gautavík to have been a trading harbour that also included a farm, at least periodically, occupied from the late twelfth century, at the latest, until shortly before 1600. Gautavík was a place of supra-regional importance, being the main port of entry in Berufjörður during the medieval period. In the sixteenth century, however, Gautavík lost its importance. This was a period of intensive trade of German merchants with Iceland, and after Bremen and Hamburg merchants established Djúpivogur and Fýluvogur at the entrance of the fjord c. 1570, both gradually superseded Gautavík, such that shortly before 1600 trade was no longer conducted there.