"his thesis examines Mesolithic wetland sites located within the peat extraction zone of the Dagsmosse bog in south-central Sweden. During the early Holocene (11,650–7,000 cal BP), small post-glacial lake basins gradually became overgrown, generating highly variable freshwater environments. Within the middle-Swedish end moraine area, hunter-gatherer-fishers (HGF) dwelled in such environments throughout this process, in some instances repeatedly returning to the same locations over several hundred years, plausibly annually on a seasonal basis. At Dagsmosse, isolation events, land upheaval, gradual overgrowth, and fluctuations in nutrient availability and acidity produced locally distinct and rapid ecosystemic successions. These fluctuations intensified during periods of low water levels, coinciding with the most frequent HGF visits to the basin (9,500–8,200 cal BP). The thesis explores the role and meaning of these environments and places within cross-generationally transmitted systems of cultural knowledge among Mesolithic groups inhabiting present-day south-central Sweden. The compilation comprises six papers (I–VI): two palaeoecological studies and four papers developing theoretical and epistemological frameworks. The empirical studies draw on palaeoenvironmental reconstructions of the basin and its margins between 11,200 and 7,000 cal BP. Analyses of pollen and Non-Pollen Palynomorphs (NPPs) provide datasets for examining socioecological causes and effects and reconstructing local and supra-local vegetation and lake-basin development. The studies indicate that HGF activities within and around the basin affected arboreal and low-growing vegetation, possibly through controlled fires and the burning of telmatic vegetation such as reeds and sedges. The four remaining papers engage in dialogue with the reader and develop theoretical frameworks central to the thesis. Their multispectral epistemological approach ranges from experimental to creative textual production, critically exploring dualistic nature–culture models in archaeology; practical and artistic knowledge in archaeological fieldwork and experiments; the phenomenology of microscopy; and, through photographic montage and travelogue, experiences of palsa mires and wetlands in eastern Finnmark. Together, these papers provide a baseline for approaching palaeoenvironmental reconstructions and narratives about HGF from more humble, ethically sound, and emotive directions, responding to calls for decolonisation within Mesolithic research. Drawing on feminist principles of situating the researcher in relation to the subject of study, the thesis further explores the subjective and co-creative dimensions of analytical and narrational processes. Critical examinations of historical and late-industrial exploitation of northwestern European peatlands, together with the development of Mesolithic research in Northern Europe, illuminate legacies of industrialisation, colonialism, and capitalism that continue to shape archaeological study materials and their interpretation. These histories have also affected the accessibility and protection of contested cultural heritage, contributing to the compromised and undervalued position of wetland archaeology within cultural heritage management today. The final discussion brings these empirical, theoretical, and ethical strands together by approaching the Mesolithic wetland sites as places of anchoring—nodes within networks of ‘home’. Through ecological and postcolonial ethics, place-specificity, and situated knowledge, the thesis ultimately considers how wetland archaeology might differently understand relations between people, places, and changing environments, both in the present and the Mesolithic past."

Ämnesord - kronologiskt