Late Mesolithic marine territoriality in coastal southern Scandinavia

Abstract

This paper attempts to identify traces of Late Mesolithic maritime territoriality in the coastal areas of southern Scandinavia. On the basis of a study of the distribution of settlements and graves of the period it is evident that these have significantly divergent distributions in the landscape and, consequently, that the distribution of the graves does not reflect the demographic situation of that time, but something else. It is concluded that an important fraction of the known Late Mesolithic graves is secondary, i.e. not directly connected to the settlements with which they appear to be spatially related, and are located at strategic points in the landscape, placed as territorial markers at some distance from where the people buried in them lived and died.