Senistidens skove og sletter: Brommekulturens landskaber i Allerødperioden

The immigration of trees and the formation of forest after the Ice Age was one of the greatest transformations of the landscape to take place in our prehistory. With the growth of the forest many of the extensive open landscapes we associate with the Late Glacial period disappeared (figs. 2 and 5). This fundamental change in the natural environment also changed living conditions for humans, since local landscape conditions greatly affected the choice of hunting strategy and tools, as well as the siting and arrangement of settlements, etc. In order to interpret the archaeological find material it is therefore crucial to clarify where and when the forest spread. A number of scientific analyses have enabled us to reconstruct the development of the vegetation in the Late Allerød period and demonstrate that this development was determined by the regional geology (figs. 3 and 5). For example, the forest spread only to the eastern Danish areas that consist of chalky and clayey soils, while western and northern Denmark lay as open heathland throughout the Late Glacial period (fig. 5). The analyses also show that there is a strong link between the contemporary Bromme Culture and the unique landscape types that were created in the Danish and northern German area, where there were a number of different ecological resource areas unlike those found elsewhere in northwestern Europe (fig. 5). The open birch forests in particular must have been attractive, with among other animals elk as game (figs. 7 and 8), while the heathlands were the home of herds of reindeer. It is therefore possible that one should regard the restricted geographical distribution of the Bromme Culture as an adaptation to the rich resources to be found in the birch forests and on the heathlands situated between the wide-ranging pine forests south of Denmark and the Late Glacial Sea in the north.