{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.029022082018927444, 'fraction_numerical': 0.016403785488958992, 'mean_word_length': 5.506155950752394, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Sea-Level Changes in Mesolithic Southern Scandinavia: long- and short-term effects on society and the environment

This is an edited version of Peter Moe Astrup’s PhD thesis. In the first sections he provides an overview of theoretical concepts and the archaeology of Mesolithic cultures in southern Scandinavia including Maglemose (9500–6400 BCE), Kongemose (6400–5400 BCE), and Ertebølle (5400–4000 BCE). In the following sections the relative-sea-level (RSL) and coastal-change data is analysed and the relationship between coastal change and Mesolithic settlements is discussed. These include human responses to sea-level change, coastal adaptions, and sedentism. The author’s particular focus is the driving processes and factors which caused Late Mesolithic (Ertebølle) coastal sites to have much greater visibility in the archaeological record than Early Mesolithic (Maglemose) sites. In order to search for new submerged Mesolithic coastal sites, 48 diver-surveys were carried out in the Bay of Aarhus by the author, and original research results are reported here. The work is illustrated with many high-quality colour palaeogeographic maps, photographs, and drawings characterizing Mesolithic societies and their palaeo-environment in southern Scandinavia. The author has developed a new empirical coastline-model for the Danish coastal zone from 8000 to 4000 BCE using more than 1300 geological and archaeological sea-level index-points (SLIPs). The dataset involves exceptionally wellpreserved submerged Mesolithic settlement-layers with no analogues in Europe or elsewhere. Archaeological SLIPs include kitchen-midden layers of the Ertebølle culture, refuse layers of the various coastal sites and shallow-water fishing structures. For all these, different elevation correction has been applied to relate them to past mean sea-levels. Well-preserved archaeological data, together with data from inundated tree-stumps and -trunks and coastal peat-deposits make this database very useful to reconstruct Mesolithic RSL changes and to understand how prehistoric societies adapted to rising sea-levels. Identified SLIPs were later grouped into different time-slices to interpolate eight RSL surfaces. These show higher RSL levels in the north-east, in areas of faster postglacial land uplift, and lower RSL levels in the south-east where surface elevations remain below zero. In general, these RSL surfaces reflect the combined effect of postglacial isostatic land uplift and Holocene sea-level rise and show good agreement with present-day land-uplift maps (Vestøl et al., 2019, NKG2016LU: a new land-uplift model for Fennoscandia and the Baltic Region, Journal of Geodesy 93: 1759–1779). However, based on these RSL surfaces it is quite difficult to assess how isostatic uplift has changed over time. For each time-slice between 8000 and 4000 BCE a different number of SLIPs from different geographic locations has been used (younger slices have more data-points). RSL isobases, therefore, tend to change their directions depending on chosen interpolation technique and distribution of the SLIPs. It seems that interpolation-dependent ‘border effects’ clearly affect the results andmake it difficult to compare different RSL surfaces to follow the uplift change. By subtracting the RSL surfaces from the presentday Digital Elevation Model, the author created eight palaeoshoreline reconstructions for the Danish straits and neighbouring areas, suggesting the early existence of the archipelago in the south-west Kattegat area since 8000 BCE. In offshore areas, however, these reconstructions are highly dependent on later marinesediment accumulation and erosion. This is potentially the largest uncertainty in his models, affecting the precision of the reconstructions. To overcome the problem the involvement of high-resolution marine seismic and sediment-coring data is needed. These datasets exist for some areas, including the south-west Kattegat, and offer the possibility of improving significantly the accuracy of the reconstruction of the Mesolithic coastal landscapes in this area (Bendixen et al., 2017, The Holocene Great Belt connection to the southern Kattegat, Scandinavia: Ancylus Lake drainage and Early Littorina Sea transgression, Boreas 46: 53–68). Various GIS techniques were applied by the author to compare the reconstructed shoreline positions with settlement data, and to test different scenarios about migration-routes and site-selection and -abandonment by theMesolithic hunter-gatherer groups. For example, relief analysis was applied to identify coastal areas (depressions) that experienced most rapid shifts from freshwater to brackish conditions, or to contour the new Mesolithic islands developed in the south-west