Life and Death in the Mesolithic of Sweden

Over the last 20 years a vast number of new and important Swedish Mesolithic sites have been excavated and published in different ways as articles, books and site reports. As yet there has been no study that tries to bring the loose ends together and so the main task of this important new work by one of Sweden’s leading prehistorians is to provide an extensive overview of some of the main sites and results. The timespan is long: c. 10 000-4000 BC and the amount and choice of data very large so rather than attempt to describe everything in detail Mats Larsson focuses on a series of fundamental research perspectives concerning Mesolithic lifeways and settlement patterns and chooses key sites to illustrate them. The emphasis is on southern and middle Sweden, though the country’s northern regions are in no way forgotten. This companion piece to the author’s recent successful volume Paths Towards a New World: Neolithic in Sweden, written for a general audience is also a must for all those archaeologists interested in the Mesolithic of Northern Europe and would be students of prehistory.

Distilling the scattered field notes and site reports of the entire Swedish Mesolithic (9700-4000 BC) into a slim volume is an impressive task never previously accomplished. Yet with his simple and salient writing style, Larsson – one of the country’s premier prehistorians – manages just that, employing a chronological and thematic approach to make sense of the diverse stone tools, bone-filled pits, and rogue post-holes peppered through Sweden's dense forests and Baltic shoals., Overall, this is a very interesting book which provides a very thorough overview of Mesolithic sites in Sweden, and especially highlighting a lot of the important new discoveries made within the last couple of decades… a really important source for students of the Mesolithic

Mats Larsson is Professor of Archaeology at Linnaeus University in Kalmar/Växjö in Sweden. He studied in Lund and wrote his dissertation on the Early Neolithic of southernmost Sweden. This is a theme he has developed over the years in books and articles. His other main interest is the late part of the Middle Neolithic in Sweden. Over the years he has cooperated with leading British Archaeologists including Julian Thomas, Mike Parker-Pearson and Richard Bradley.