Armatures and the question of forager-farmer contact along the north-western fringe of the LBK: the site of Verrebroek-»Aven Ackers« (East Flanders, Belgium)

Abstract

Armatures and the question of forager-farmer contact along the north-western fringe of the LBK: the site of Verrebroek-»Aven Ackers« (East Flanders, Belgium)

A central problem in determining whether or not there was cultural transmission of armature technologies between Later Mesolithic foragers and Early Neolithic LBK farmers has been the lack of an absolute chronology that would consolidate knowledge of the origins of particular typo-technological attributes thought to have been transmitted. Recent excavations at the Late Mesolithic site of Verrebroek-»Aven Ackers« yielded a securely dated armature assemblage that forces scholars to reconceptualise the question of the role of armatures as evidence of cultural transmission between foragers and the earliest farmers of Northwestern Europe. This paper examines the role of this important site in the context of a larger study comparing the armature industries of Late/Final Mesolithic and LBK sites in Belgium and the southern Netherlands.