Komsa culture
The Komsa culture (also called Finnmark culture ) was a Stone Age culture of hunters and gatherers that existed in northern Norway and Sweden . It is named after the Komsaberg near Alta in the Norwegian province of Finnmark , where the first remains of the culture were discovered in 1925. "The first evidence of human settlement appears in the early stages of the Komsa culture. The radiocarbon dates for the earliest settlements show a significant human presence in northernmost Scandinavia before 9000 BC (Woodman 1999)"
The earlier distinction between a Komsa culture in the Arctic Circle, which used stone tools, and a Hensbakka culture (also: Fosna culture) , which stretched from Trøndelag to the Oslo Fjord , became obsolete in the 1970s. Although both used different tools, they belonged to the same culture.
Recent archaeological finds in Lapland ( Dumpokjauratj ) raised the idea that there was also an (isolated) inland part of the Komsa culture, just as old as those on the Norwegian coast. Some archaeologists see these people as the ancestors of today's Sami . However, these finds presumably represent a connection with the early post- Swideria of the Kunda culture (7,400 - 6,000 BC), which was widespread in the north of central Russia and the eastern Baltic states . The Komsa culture would have been influenced by an early immigration of carriers of this post-Swiderien culture in northernmost Scandinavia .
According to today's view, the Komsa culture coincides with the earliest settlement of the northern Norwegian coast, which started from the western and southwestern coast and ultimately reached its climax in the end-Paleolithic Ahrensburg culture in northwestern Europe . The bearers of the Komsa culture probably followed - when the Ice Age between 11,000 and 8,000 BC. BC came to an end - the game moving north along the Norwegian coastline in the course of the receding glaciation into new hunting areas. Some of these people settled what is now Finnmark from the northeast relatively early , possibly via the Kola Peninsula ; however, there is still no real proof of this assumption.
However, archaeological evidence suggests that the Komsa culture has always turned towards the sea, they lived mainly from seal hunting and were good boat builders and fishermen .
Compared to the southern Norwegian Hensbakka culture (also: Fosna culture) , a variety of the same culture (see above), the stone tools of the northern compatriots were relatively crude and primitive, which is probably due to a lack of flint in this area.
literature
- Emil Hoffmann: Lexicon of the Stone Age (= Beck'sche series. 1325). Beck Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-42125-3 .
- Ville Luho: The Komsa culture (= Suomen Muinaismuistoyhdistyksen. 57). Suomen Muinaismuistoyhdistyksen, Helsinki 1956.
- Theron Douglas Price: Ancient Scandinavia: An Archaeological History from the First Humans to the Vikings . Oxford University Press 2015.
Individual evidence
- ↑ https://books.google.de/books?id=dbC6BwAAQBAJ Theron Douglas Price, Ancient Scandinavia: An Archaeological History from the First Humans to the Vikings (2015), p. 52
- ↑ http://www.utexas.edu/courses/sami/dieda/hist/early.htm