Komsa culture
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| Holocene epoch |
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| ↑ Pleistocene |
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The Komsa culture was a stone age culture of hunter-gatherers that existed in northern Norway from around 10000 BC. The culture is named after the Komsa mountain in the community of Alta, Finnmark, where the first remains of the culture were discovered in 1925. The distinction between “Komsa” type of stone-tool culture north of the Arctic Circle and a “Fosna” type from Trøndelag to Oslo Fjord rendered obsolete in the 1970s. Nowadays both phenomena are ascribed to different types of tools of the same culture.[1]
Recently, archeological finds from Finnish Lapland have revealed a presence of the Komsa culture equally old to the earliest finds from the Norwegian coast forcing a re-evaluation concerning the strictness of the maritime nature of the culture as well as direction of spread. [2]
The commonly held view today is that the earliest settlement of the North Norwegian coast originated on the western and southwestern coast of Norway and ultimately in the final Palaeolithic Ahrensburg culture of northwestern Europe.[3] The Komsa are thought to have followed the Norwegian coastline when receding glaciation at the end of the last ice age (between 11,000 and 8000 BC) opened up new areas for settlement. Some elements may have moved into modern-day Finnmark from the northeast, possibly coming from ice-free coasts of the Kola Peninsula, though evidence to this formerly widely held view[4] is still poor.[1]
Archaeological evidence indicates that the Komsa culture was almost exclusively sea-oriented, living mainly off seal hunting and being able boatbuilders and fishermen. In comparison to the southern Norway's contemporary Fosna variety of this same culture, stone tools and other implements appear relatively crude. This has been explained with a paucity of flintstone in the region.
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ a b [1] Brittanica online, Norway
- ^ PEOPLE, MATERIAL CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT IN THE NORTH Proceedings of the 22nd Nordic Archaeological Conference, University of Oulu, 18-23 August 2004 Edited by Vesa-Pekka Herva GUMMERUS KIRJAPAINO [2]
- ^ Survey and excavation at Lake Vetsijärvi, Lapland - Tuija Rankama & Jarmo Kankaanpää, in: PEOPLE, MATERIAL CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT IN THE NORTH, Proceedings of the 22nd Nordic Archaeological Conference, University of Oulu, 18-23 August 2004, Edited by Vesa-Pekka Herva [3]
- ^ This view was still held in the 80s:[4] The Paleohistory of Circumpolar Arctic Colonization - JANUSZ KOZLOWSKI and H.-G. BANDI, Actic VOL. 37, NO. 4 (DECEMBER 1984) P. 358372
