New research suggests that the Neolithic Pitted Ware Culture (PWC) in Scandinavia may have used advanced transport by high seas for long distance maritime travel and exchange.
Beyond the Dugout Canoe
The orthodox image of Neolithic timber transport in Scandinavia has been based on puny dugout canoes. Nevertheless, Fauvelle and colleagues find that the PWC may have just had a surprise trick up their piscine sleeves: skin boats.
Skin boats, as opposed to the local dugout canoes, are more adept at long-distance and open-ocean travel. The widespread connection of the PWC traders and sailors in this new technology might shed a light on the known maritime activities and trading of PWC in the Neolithic period. These researchers report that although firm physical evidence of such skin boats remains lacking, from hunting tools to potential bone-based boat frames and even rock art as well as seal accumulations in the refuse piles at PWC sites provide indirect indications that these features existed.
The PWC — Seals, Cod, and Weever
The skin boats are indicated evidence by the faunal assemblages in PWC sites that an be of skins. Their consumption of predominantly seals, Atlantic cod and Greater Weever suggest a significant use of open water simulation to these maritime hunter — gatherers.
Seals were an important resource to the PWC, used not only for food but for their hides too; making it possible they constructed water-tight skin boats. The discovery of seal remains, along with implements including scrapers and awls such as would be used in hide working, help support this supposition.
This, combined with the fact that COD and Greater Weever live in deeper, more turbulent waters from which fishing would require seaworthy boats, implies practices involving access to such resources whilst using other types of Vessel e.g. PWC’s. The skin boat technology perhaps was the solution why PWC’s became the masters of the sea and adapted well in an environment as harsh as in Scandinavia.
Conclusion
Rémi presents the first that argues a world beyond boats for the early Pitters The work offers new perspectives and possibilities in understanding how innovations could have reached the somewhat isolated Neolithic Pitted Ware Culture of Scandinavia. Through these flexible craft, they were able to travel long distances, hunt larger animals, and trade with other Neolithic cultures as well — all factors that made them unique among their contemporary societies and delivered a blueprint for the maritime-dependent way of life. Little in the way of physical evidence now exists, but the nature of skin boat life across northern Scandinavia is strongly supported by indirect clues found by the researchers, which suggest tanning technology was crucial for developing early Scandinavian communities.
