LiDAR data and the temporal trends in the frequency of hunter-gatherer sites in the northwest coast of Finland 10,000-2,000 calBP

Summary

Investigation of LiDAR visualizations has become a standard tool in archaeological site detection in Finland, as large part of the country has been LiDAR scanned. Because archaeologists alone do not have enough resources to thoroughly analyze these big data, part of the work has been crowd sourced. Thanks to active volunteers, not only the number of sites has increased, but we now have new types of sites, and sites in environmental contexts that have previously been ignored in archaeological surveys. Here, we use LiDAR-derived archaeological data together with data from traditional sources. We track changes in the temporal frequency distribution of hunter-gatherer house pit sites, sites without house pits, and sites with rectangular stone megastructures in northwestern Finland (N=739). We show a boom-and-bust cycles in the frequency of sites between 10,000 and 2,000 calBP. House pit sites and megastructures coincide with the last and the most prominent of the booms peaking at 5800-5700 calBP. Interestingly, hunter-gatherers do not seem to recover from the subsequent bust, and the number of sites remains low until the end of the study period. We suggest that this is related to the cooling climate and declining productivity of the Baltic Sea.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Frison Institute Symposium: The Future of "Big Data" in Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15494