ABSTRACT
Norway offers good opportunities to study coastal adaptation in human societies during the Early and Mid-Holocene. Chapter 3 aims to demonstrate how the coastal region of southeastern Norway and its resources were of central importance for the people who settled there during the Mesolithic. In order to investigate settlement strategies, a case from the western coast of the Oslo fjord region is presented. Here, settlement strategies and site location are discussed in terms of location near the shoreline by correlating radiocarbon-dated contexts of anthropogenic origin with the shoreline displacement curve. Furthermore, the relative population size during the Mesolithic and Neolithic is studied using radiocarbon dates as proxy. Finally, the subsistence economy is investigated by looking at the available faunal data from excavated sites in the region as well as isotopic evidence of human remains from Norway and the neighbouring regions.
