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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

The Storegga tsunami c. 6150 BC - a wave of destruction or transformative disruption for a prehistoric society?

Alternative title: Storeggatsunamien 6150 f.Kr. – en utslettende katastrofe eller kime til endring?

Awarded: NOK 11.7 mill.

Project Number:

302858

Application Type:

Project Period:

2020 - 2024

Subject Fields:

Partner countries:

Did a tsunami, 8200 years ago, cause a demographic collapse in South Norway? Or did the Storegga tsunami only disrupt the societal machinery causing it to slightly move in a different way? What does the knowledge of how hard the tsunami hit the different parts of the West coast tell us about social safety in the Stone Age? On this project, we are studying coastal living before and after the tsunami, to see if we can detect any changes. Some of the emerging results indicate that the societies in the Stone Age were pretty good at handling crises. We investigate if people chose to move further from the beach or whether the way they made their tools changed abruptly after the tsunami. Knowledge connected to tool production seems to have been shared within the groups. This made sure people would still have essential tools and skills if half the group were lost at sea for example. That the same tool tradition is found cross-regionally on the West coast, tells us that knowledge was also shared between groups. The Norwegian Geotechnical Institute has developed a model that simulates the behaviour of the tsunami. It shows the brutality of the wave, but also that there were large local variations in impact. In turn, this would have made local experiences with the wave different too. Hence, the wave created different social situations for the groups to handle. Some groups were probably wiped out, but in some areas the wave only disrupted the social machine. These disruptions might be the seed causing the growing regional differences in material culture found in the millennia after the tsunami, especially between Central, Southwestern, and Eastern Norway. To understand how a tsunami may have affected people beyond the immediate physical destruction, requires us to engage with other strands of research too. In anthropological disaster research there are many studies that focuses on how people handle trauma and crises. We can also engage with the tsunami as monster. A tsunami is a monster that brings death and destruction, ruined lives, and landscapes. Often, humans react to such experiences by turning to their gods or spirits. Explaining the unexplainable via mythos and stories. Rituals, but also tool production, along sides myths and stories, express social affinity and are ways for societies to remember or maintain knowledge. The latter is something we will continue to focus on in the upcoming year of this project.

C. 6150 BC, the Storegga tsunami inundated the coast of Western Norway, Scotland and North Britain. This disruptive event is central to our project. We aim to identify, understand and explain the tsunami’s short- and long-term impacts on small-scale, shore-bound Stone Age communities in the subsequent periods. The tsunamis date and physical impact is known, but it is a disaster in as much as it entails large-scale loss of lives, property and livelihood. A tsunami is also a social phenomenon interrupting historical contingency. Studied as a large disruptive event, we will examine whether the Storegga tsunami was an accelerator for social developments, potentially opening social systems up to change, like transforming social order. To reach our objectives, we will investigate patterns of human activity, mobility, settlements and ritual behaviour, both on a local site level and with a wider geographical scope. Identifying the character of knowledge transmission, patterns of continuity or change in material culture and cultural traditions can indicate the type of impact experienced and subsequent strategies. We venture the risky task of investigating social reorientations and practices of prehistoric societies by studying a fragmentary archaeological record. For new insights into societal recovery after the Storegga tsunami, we will combine studies of site distribution, lithics, landscape reconstruction, micromorphology, Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon dates, with recent hazard research and theories from the social and humanistic sciences. We will deliver new insights into to how to identify a tsunamis impact, and an interpretative framework for understanding aspects of how small-scale, prehistoric societies recovered post-disaster, expressed both through social and ritual practices. Communication of how humans mediated external challenges in the past might also inspire acknowledgment of and compassion for similar experiences and encounters shared by people in our time.

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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam