Seating spaces in Scandinavian Mesolithic dwellings

Abstract

The analysis of positioning patterns for individuals in Mesolithic dwellings presented here is based, on the one hand, on ethnographic data on hunter-gatherer culture-specific patterns for the placing of individuals in the dwelling space and, on the other, on observations in the excavated archaeological record of repetition in the spatial organisation of small artefact concentrations, hearths etc. in the well-preserved remains of Mesolithic dwellings. In addition to the latter spatial organisational patterns, zones containing relatively low densities of debitage fragments have also, in a couple of cases, been seen to coincide with the proposed positions of individuals, as indicated by the ‘positive’ activity indicators. It has been suggested that these so-called ‘seating spaces’ reflect that individuals seated in a dwelling kept their seating positions free of smaller pieces of waste. They possibly achieved this by sitting on some form of underlay – a small mat of skin or bark – that could easily be cleaned off, while they drew to their seating positions larger pieces of debitage that were useful as tools for cutting, shaping etc. Based on data from several well-documented Mesolithic sites, this paper investigates this latter aspect further as a potentially independent way of checking the results of the first phase of distribution analysis of the Mesolithic dwellings. In general, recent excavations incorporating systematic recording of the flint debitage appear to produce meaningful results, while earlier excavations, where this category was recorded in less detail – often just being counted and discarded – tend not to.

Keywords:

Spatial Analysis, Ethnoarchaeology, Mesolithic Archaeology, Dwellings, Stone Age, Hunter-Gatherer, Organizational Symbolism