Ertebølle culture

The Ertebølle culture (c. 5,300 BCE – 3,950 BCE) (Danish pronunciation: [ˈɛɐ̯təˌpølə]) is a hunter-gatherer and fisher, pottery-making culture dating to the end of the Mesolithic period. The culture was concentrated in Southern Scandinavia. It is named after the type site, a location in the small village of Ertebølle on Limfjorden in Danish Jutland. In the 1890s the National Museum of Denmark excavated heaps of oyster shells there, mixed with mussels, snails, bones, and artefacts of bone, antler, and flint, which were evaluated as kitchen middens (Danish køkkenmødding), or refuse dumps. Accordingly, the culture is less-commonly named the Kitchen Midden. As it is approximately identical to the Ellerbek culture of Schleswig-Holstein, the combined name, Ertebølle-Ellerbek is often used. The Ellerbek culture (German Ellerbek-Kultur) is named after a type site in Ellerbek, a community on the edge of Kiel, Germany.

In the 1960s and 1970s another closely related culture was found in the (now dry) Noordoostpolder in the Netherlands, near the village Swifterbant and the former island of Urk. Named the Swifterbant culture (5,300 – 3,400 BCE) they show a transition from hunter-gatherer to both animal husbandry, primarily cows and pigs, and cultivation of barley and emmer wheat. During the formative stages contact with nearby Linear Pottery culture settlements in Limburg has been detected. Like the Ertebølle culture, they lived near open water, in this case creeks, riverdunes, and bogs along post-glacial banks of the Overijsselse Vechte. Recent excavations show a local continuity going back to (at least) 5,600 BCE, when burial practices resembled the contemporary gravefields in Denmark and South Sweden "in all details", suggesting only part of a diverse ancestral "Ertebølle"-like heritage was locally continued into the later (Middle Neolithic) Swifterbant tradition (4,200 – 3,400 BCE).

The Ertebølle culture was roughly contemporaneous with the Linear Pottery culture, food-producers whose northernmost border was located just to the south. The Ertebølle did not practice agriculture but it did utilize domestic grain in some capacity, which it must have obtained from the south.

The Ertebølle culture replaced the earlier Kongemose culture of Denmark. It was limited to the north by the Scandinavian Nøstvet and Lihult cultures. It is divided into an early phase c. 5,300 BCE – c. 4,500 BCE, and a later phase c. 4,500 BCE – 3,950 BCE. Shortly after 4,100 BCE the Ertebølle began to expand along the Baltic coast at least as far as Rügen. Shortly thereafter it was replaced by the Funnelbeaker culture.

In recent years archaeologists have found the acronym EBK most convenient, parallel to LBK for German Linearbandkeramik (Linear Pottery culture) and TRB for German Trichterbecher, Danish Tragtbæger (Funnelbeaker culture), and Dutch trechterbekercultuur. Ostensibly for Ertebølle Kultur, EBK could be either German or Danish, and has the added advantage that Ellerbek also begins with E.