Lithic technology in Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Southern Scandinavia Mikkel Sørensen
In this keynote talk a brief introduction to the research history of the Stone Age in southern Scandinavia is given. Further, focus is on how the study of lithic technology during the last decades have changed our understanding and provided new knowledge about Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Societies. The “chaîne opératoire” approach has in this process been a powerful method that has made us leave a static national understanding of single tool types in order to analyse socially constituted knowledge in lithic craft processes across northern Europe. One of the main results of this research is that a migration of people and knowledge from western Russia into Scandinavia during the 8th millennium BC has been identified. With this migration, new blade, weapon and ground stone tool technologies are introduced for the first time in northwestern Europe.