Håkon Glørstad

University of Oslo · Museum of Cultural History

While International Relations scholars have recently excavated a number of systems previously unstudied by the discipline, few have discussed the emergence of fully-fledged systems in prehistory. Fully-fledged system have continuous multilinear (between more than two units at the time) and multidimensional (more than one institution in evidence) in...

Minneord om professor Frode Iversen (1967–2022).

Archaeologically produced knowledge of prehistory has grown to a point where international relations (IR) may begin to incorporate it in their own work. In this article, we try to facilitate this process by introducing IR scholars to archaeology's material data and ways of thinking about it. New types of system units, such as households and kinship...

Reformen av kulturminnevernet og det politiske landskapet. Noen betraktninger om estetikk, endetidsfortellinger, kanon og ressursavsavn

Anders Nummedal - one hour ahead of his time. Anders Nummedal is considered as an archaeological pioneer. In the 1910s, he developed techniques for surveying landscapes, involving systematic and physical examination of the terrain for Stone Age sites. This was in a sharp contrast to the ordinary procedure of doing Stone Age Archaeology at this time...

Research on early agriculture in Europe unfolds in the light of hindsight, and the introduction of farming has proven to have a significant impact on European culture and history. Recent research on this watershed in history tends to favour solid evidence based on scientific studies on dietary shift and population movement. While this provide us wi...

The presence of submerged Stone Age sites along the Norwegian coast has been recognised for a long time. Until recently, however, they have not been treated as a topic of interest. From shallow waters, more than 80 submerged Stone Age sites are known in Norway, one of which is a probable ritual site with bones of several humans. Due to complex patt...

Due to the need for a national strategy for offshore wind farms in Norway, a small and preliminary joint archaeological and geological research project was conducted. The aim of the investigation was to determine the possibilities for human occupation in the southernmost parts of the Norwegian sector of the North Sea during the Late Glacial and Pre...

The Norwegian coast facing the Atlantic Ocean was ice free as early as the Allerød oscillation in the late Pleistocene. The landscape was probably habitable for humans. It has, therefore, been assumed by several scholars that this coastline was visited or inhabited from the Late Glacial period onwards. In part, this argumentation is based on the pr...

The article presents an Early Neolithic site from southernmost Norway called Hamremoen. Here, the Museum of Cultural History excavated the remains of an enclosure in 2010-2011 is part of Norway has little solid evidence of agrarian activity from the Early Neolithic. Instead it looks like the forager way of life was sustained. The appearance of an e...

The Norwegian coast facing the Atlantic Ocean was ice free as early as the Allerød oscillation in the late Pleistocene. The landscape was probably habitable for humans. It has, therefore, been assumed by several scholars that this coastline was visited or inhabited from the Late Glacial period onwards. In part, this argumentation is based on the pr...

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.

In Norway, cultural heritage management is still an integrated part of the universities. Five university museums are responsible for all development-led excavations. Thus, cultural heritage management is strongly inspired by the “humboldtian” idea that research, education, and management should constitute an integrated system of knowledge productio...

During the last ten years there has been a growing interest in understanding the earliest settlement of northern Europe. In Norway, specialized marine adaptation and high mobility based on traffic with seafaring skin boats are key elements in a new synthesis of the colonization process. This article addresses the process of colonization from a pers...

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...

The paper presents a sculpture made of a fossilised shell. It was found during an excavation at the site Torpum 9b in Østfold, south-eastern Norway. The site and thereby the figure are dated to the late Mesolithic period. The sculpture is interpreted as an essence of female attributes, that is the hips and pelvis of a female human with the genitali...