Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2014
During the last fifty years, research in the Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods in Denmark (to use the now generally accepted terms) was decisively influenced from outside. The interesting paper by Gustav Schwantes (1928) was unfortunately published when there was little activity in Denmark regarding ‘Early Stone Age’ problems. When J. G. D. Clark a few years later wrote his classic work The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe (1936), the situation was different, and the book came just in time to stimulate one of the real active periods in the study of Danish Mesolithic. Since then many new finds and excavations have been known from this country but without altering the main lines and the general picture of the hunters and fishers during the Boreal and Atlantic phases.
It would not be quite correct to say that our idea of Clark's first period in question has remained unchanged. The following lines are meant as a short survey of the time of the Northern reindeer-hunters or, according to later suggestions (e.g. by J. G. D. Clark (1950, 91)) the Late Palaeolithic. In 1936 it was only possible to register stray finds of implements here (mainly from reindeer-antler), and following Schwantes most of them were ascribed the still rather theoretical Lyngby culture (Schwantes, 1923; Ekholm, 1926). During the late thirties Alfred Rust began his revolutionary excavations in Holstein (1937; 1943), and they were, of course, followed with keen interest also by Danish archaeologists.