Berit Valentin Eriksen

• Prof. Dr.
• Senior Researcher at Stiftung Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseen, Schloss Gottorf

The European Final Palaeolithic witnessed marked changes in almost all societal domains. Despite a rich body of evidence, our knowledge of human palaeodemographic processes and regional population dynamics still needs to be improved. In this study, we present regionally differentiated population estimates for the Greenland Interstadial 1d-a (GI-1d-...

The European Final Palaeolithic witnessed marked changes in almost all societal domains. Despite a rich body of evidence, our knowledge of palaeodemographic processes and regional population dynamics still needs to be improved. In this study, we present regionally differentiated estimates of absolute numbers and population densities for the Greenla...

This chapter starts with a theoretical introduction to the concept of the creation and perception of cultural landscapes. Niche construction theory and human agency, often treated as controverse concepts are discussed as complementary aspects of human environment relations. The DPSIR framework (the concept of Driving forces, Pressures, States, Impa...

This chapter explores research pertaining to the possible evidence of copper tools being used in flint knapping processes in early metal-using societies in South Scandinavia. The existence and use of copper as a flint working tool in prehistoric Scandinavian contexts has often been proposed and accepted, but no real study on the implementation as s...

The Baltic Sea basins, some of which only submerged in the mid-Holocene, preserve Stone Age structures that did not survive on land. Yet, the discovery of these features is challenging and requires cross-disciplinary approaches between archeology and marine geosciences. Here, we combine shipborne and autonomousunderwater vehicle hydroacoustic data...

The Lieth Moor area, located in the district of Pinneberg, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, is a hotspot of Late Palaeolithic settlement activity. The exceptional abundance of archaeological sites is commonly attributed to the presence of a large palaeolake. However, in the Weichselian Late glacial, there were numerous large lakes in Schleswig-Holstein...

Background Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) are iconic mammals that inhabit the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. In these areas, reindeer not only play a vital ecological role, but they also hold cultural and economic significance for indigenous communities. In order to thrive in the harsh conditions of the northernmost areas of the world, reindeer have...

Bone points were one of the major hunting implements in northern European hunter-gatherer societies. They differ in shapes, types, and manufacturing techniques. In this paper, we investigate 22 bone points from the territory of Lithuania, by studying their morpho-technological characteristics, direct dates, and adhesive residues. The majority are i...

In a vast and dynamic Late Glacial landscape in the southeastern North Sea, Heligoland must have been of immense importance. It was a landmark, vantage point and source region of unique red flint, which was extracted there and transported into the present inland since the Late Palaeolithic. The reconstruction of Late Palaeolithic living and migrati...

The publication at hand are the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Archaeological Prospection held between March 28 and April 1, 2023, in Kiel, Germany. The content of the articles ranges from local to large-scale case studies all over the world and from various archaeological times, over methodological improvements, new processing...

The Lieth Moor area, dist. Pinneberg, is a hotspot of Late Palaeolithic settlement activity in Schleswig-Holstein. This study aims to better understand what kind of landscape was present in the Late Glacial period.

Studies in prehistoric technologies is an important source of knowledge about societies, providing data on human behaviour, mobility and knowledge transmission across time and space. Northern Europe was re-populated in the Late Upper Palaeolithic when the last Scandinavian glacier retreated and the landscape was once again available for habitation....

You are warmly welcome to attend the upcoming workshop »Quarries and Mines in Social Context: Connecting Patterns of Change in Neolithic Cultural Landscapes« organized by Berit V. Eriksen and Lynn E. Fisher on behalf of the CRC1266, Kiel University on June 8-10, 2022. The workshop will take place at the Hotel Birke in Kiel (www.hotel-birke.de). Y...

Bronze Age flint-working at Bjerre, Thy.

The Danish Palaeolithic began during the Lateglacial (approximately 12,350 calBC) and lasted for about four thousand years. Only a handful of sites and organic stray finds have been precisely dated. And it is primarily on these that a preliminary chronological framework has been built. Similarly, numerous hypotheses on palaeohistory, typology, and...

Bjerre 7 is a modest Late Bronze Age house in Thy, Denmark. Excellent preservation and full-recovery techniques provided comprehensive evidence of farm self-sufficiency, local exchange, and amber collection for trade. Spatial analyses of ceramics, lithics, plant macrofossils, and amber identified distinctive activity areas at both ends of the house...

This contribution presents the status quo of research on the Final Palaeolithic occupation of Schleswig-Holstein. Over the last two decades new insights became possible based on isotopic, genetic, biostratigraphic, tephrochronologic, and archaeological analyses. Some of these projects and studies are still ongoing. The material on which these analy...

Call for papers. Please submit your contributions until the 11th of Feb 2021 via the Login of the EAA homepage: https://eaa.klinkhamergroup.com/eaa2021/

Kettle holes are common ice decay features in formerly glacial landscapes like those in Southern Scandinavia and Northern Germany. Here the kettle holes are represented either as dry depressions, wetland areas or lakes. However, the majority of these features are silted and part of the present farmland. We investigated a small kettle hole at Tyrste...

Location modeling, both inductive and deductive, is widely used in archaeology to predict or investigate the spatial distribution of sites. The commonality among these approaches is their consideration of only spatial effects of the first order (i.e., the interaction of the locations with the site characteristics). Second-order effects (i.e., the i...

Hansjürgen Müller-Beck was a cosmopolitan who was at home throughout the human world in all its geographical and temporal dimensions. Research and teaching led him to the Arctic, both east and west of the Bering Strait, and to the tropics from America to Asia, with short detours to Africa as well (Figure 1). He was an expert on the entire range of...

Session 2 "Transformation as human response to climate and environmental change?" at the GSHDL/CRC 1266 International Workshop held at Kiel University 11-16 March 2019, deadline for abstract submission: 15 November 2018 http://www.workshop-gshdl.uni-kiel.de

The 26th Annual Meeting of the German Mesolithic Workgroup took place in Wuppertal from 10-12 March 2017 and was organised and hosted by Annabell Zander (University of York) and Birgit Gehlen (CRC 806, University of Cologne). In sum, more than 70 academics, students and amateur archaeologists from 8 different countries attended this conference. The...

Call for Papers for session 4 of the 5th International Workshop of the Graduate School Human Developments in Landscapes, Kiel, 20-24th March 2017.

Im Rahmen der wissenschaftlichen Forschung stehen für die Universitäten in Deutschland zahlreiche Fördermöglichkeiten zur Verfügung. Zu den größten genehmigten Projekten gehören sog. ≪Zentrenbildungen≫, in denen z. B. über Exzellenzinitiativen oder Sonderforschungsbereiche (SFB) neue Forschergruppen nachhaltig eingerichtet werden. Stehen diese norm...

http://www.quartaer.eu/archiv.html

Chaîne opératoire -analysis of the spread of western and eastern blade technologies in the Early Mesolithic of the Circum-Baltic countries, with particular attention to the spread of the pressure technique.

http://www.quartaer.eu/archiv.html

Over 3000 prehistoric bone and antler artifacts, collected in the late 1930s from the former lakebed of Lake Lubāns, are held by the National History Museum of Latvia. This collection is remarkable not only as one of the largest known assemblages of bone implements in northern Europe, but also in terms of diversity of forms. The most elaborately wo...

In this paper a team of Scandinavian researchers identifies and describes a Mesolithic technological concept, referred to as ‘the conical core pressure blade’ concept, and investigates how this concept spread into Fennoscandia and across Scandinavia. Using lithic technological, contextual archaeological and radiocarbon analyses, it is demonstrated...

http://www.quartaer.eu/archiv.html

http://www.quartaer.eu/archiv.html

http://www.quartaer.eu/archiv.html

Sofaer, Joanna, Bech, J.-H., Budden, S., Choyke, A., Eriksen, B. V., Horvath, T., Kovacs, G., Kreiter, A., Muhlenbock, C. and Sticka, H.-P. 2010: Technology and craft. In: Earle, T. and Kristiansen, K. (eds.) Organising Bronze Age Societies. European Society in Late Prehistory: A Comparative Approach. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 185-...

Throughout western Europe, the Pleistocene—Holocene transition is characterized by marked environmental and cultural changes. Following the gradual retreat of the Weichselian glacier, large areas in the north and northeast were again-or at last-made available to human settlement. Obviously, then, this period is one of great archaeological significa...