Oxford Handbook of Mesolithic Europe

The Baltic Sea basin represents the southern and eastern Baltic shores and hinterlands of the countries Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Mesolithic in this area begins roughly at the Pleistocene–Holocene transition and ends with the appearance of pottery in Latvia and Lithuania or the establishment of agrarian Neolithic cultures in the other countries under consideration. It comprises several archaeological entities that are differentiated by artefact spectra and were present in different timespans. During the Preboreal and Boreal, the pan-European Maglemosian was present in the western parts and the last Swiderian and Pulli complex in the east. The area is characterized during the middle Mesolithic by the Kongemose and Chojnice-Pieńki cultures, while the Kunda culture appears at the beginning of the Boreal in the eastern Baltic area. During the Late Mesolithic, the Ertebølle culture establishes itself in Germany and western Poland, while the Janisławice (Neman) culture is distributed in eastern Poland and Lithuania. Further north, the Narva culture is present in Latvia and Estonia. While most of the cultural entities in the area were originally defined from a national perspective, modern research has shown that several of these belong to superregional technocomplexes.