Diving into the Stone Age: Approaches to Investigating a Submerged Stone Age Megastructure in the Baltic Sea

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hunting for Hunters, Underwater: Results and Future Directions for Submerged Ancient Sites" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2021, geologists discovered a curious, almost 1km long stone wall in 21m of water off the German coast in the Baltic. The structure is situated on basal till in close proximity to the shoreline of a sunken lake, and exhibits a number of characteristics that point to an anthropogenic, rather than a geological, origin. The stone wall, designated "Blinkerwall" in reference to its geographical location, was the focus of further multidisciplinary investigations in 2022 and 2023. These have led to the current hypothesis that the structure may represent a Late Pleistocene or Early Holocene drive lane for hunting reindeer. While numerous archaeological sites from the Stone Age are known along the Baltic coast of Germany, these are located in shallower water and mostly date to the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. The investigation of the "Blinkerwall" thus presents an opportunity to study the subsistence strategies and mobility patterns of the first hunter-gatherers that followed the retreating ice sheets in Northern Europe. Furthermore, it may facilitate the discovery of analogous structures in remote basins of the Western Baltic Sea. This paper offers a short overview of the current state of the art of the project and discusses methodological approaches.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Hunting for Hunters, Underwater: Results and Future Directions for Submerged Ancient Sites

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50520