A technology linked to symbolism, the cause for Nordic Mesolithic industrial change?

International audienceAt the end of the eighth millennium BC, Scandinavian Europe experienced a major technological change: the arrival of pressure debitage (Sørensen 2012). Unknown previously on the territory, especially in Zealand, the adoption of this one raises the question of the conditions of its adoption: innovation, transfer of technology or demic move (Sørensen et al., 2013). Whatever the scenario, the appropriation of this new technology in the lithic, as it will have allowed the obtaining of more standardized supports, brings another industrial transformation on the long term during the middle and final Mesolithic: the bone points which were traditionally simple or barbed are everywhere replaced by slotted points, whose stem is made of bone or even of vegetal wood. In a few decades, the previous material culture disappears completely, so. In addition, the recording of the oldest aspects of these slotted points in the territory sees the arrival of fundamentally new forms - the spearheads made of bone – in comparison to the hunting and fishing gear then in use. We will therefore question the scope of these transformations in industrial terms and in the relationship glimpsed between the premises of the adoption of a new technology and the symbolic value that it may have received, not only as a technical phenomenon but also in the type of hunting or even in the hunted animal species itself to which it could have returned in a new way.Sørensen, M., 2012. The arrival and development of pressure blade technology in southern Scandinavia. In: Desrosiers, P. (Ed.), The Emergence of Pressure Blade Making: from Origin to Modern Experimentation. Springer, New York, pp. 237e260.Sørensen, M., Rankama, T., Kankaanpaa, J., Knutsson, K., Knutsson, H., Melvold, S., Eriksen, B.V., Glørstad, H., 2013. The first eastern migrations of people and knowledge into Scandinavia: evidence from studies of Mesolithic technology, 9th-8th millennium BC. Norwegian Archaeological Review 46 (1), 19-56