Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
entirely based on the archaeological remains of earlier cultures because contempo-
rary written sources are not available for the period before the gradual introduction
of Christianity from the ninth to the thirteenth century AD when priests and monks
came to the coast of the Baltic Sea and wrote down their observations - mostly
about political and military events. Thus the historiography of the Baltic area began.
However, it is now agreed that even for this later phase in mankind's history the
archaeological record must also be taken into consideration if there is to be a
comprehensive reconstruction of living conditions in the past.
The use of archaeological and historical methods makes it possible to obtain
spatially and chronologically differentiated information about the cultural charac-
teristics of former societies as expressed, for example, in house-building traditions,
costume fashions or burial customs. However, if one also wants to analyse more
general living conditions, such as the climatic and environmental conditions or
the available resources, historical research must be supplemented by the scientific
information provided by disciplines such as botany, zoology and the geosciences.
The results of these investigations permit the reconstruction of the biosphere and
geosphere that gave rise to the environment of the former settlement area and
they are, therefore, essential for understanding settlement behaviour and thus the
anthroposphere.
This applies in principle to all landscapes that are used as a source of food or
are occupied, settled and even modified by humans, but it is especially applicable to
the coastal area of the Baltic Sea. The communities living there since deglaciation
not only had to constantly adapt to the ever-changing composition of the flora and
fauna - both on shore and in the sea - but also, in some periods, had to face and react
to dramatic changes in the shoreline caused by isostatic rebound and land uplift on
the one hand and the constant eustatic rise in sea level on the other. The removal
of inundated settlements to more secure spots, the abandonment of graveyards in
flooded areas and the relocation of silted-up landing and harbour sites or dried-
out fishing fences in areas of land uplift are all evidence of the reaction of ancient
communities to the changing environmental and living conditions.
To sum up, the people living on the Baltic rim in the past were continually forced
to adapt their economic strategies to a changing environment. Consequently, their
remains - preserved in the soil ever since they abandoned their homes - are, today,
considered to be an important record not only of settlement history but also of
coastal development. Especially since the beginning of the 1990s, when absolute-
chronological classification by
14
C dating was supplemented by the AMS method,
which also enabled the dating of very small samples of organic material, an increas-
ing number of archaeological sites that were originally on the coast have been
investigated not only to answer archaeological questions but also to obtain data
about the sea level at the time of their occupation (Fischer
1996
, Åkerlund et al.
1997
).
Since then, there has been very intensive and fruitful interdisciplinary coopera-
tion between archaeologists, geoscientists and modelling specialists in many parts
of the Baltic Sea area. An example to be mentioned here is the DFG research unit
SINCOS, which aims to obtain new data on the changes in the coastal landscape
