INDICAVE: The use of caves and rockshelters in Norway

INDICAVE: Synthesizing the Norwegian record of caves and rockshelters as an indicator-grid to
reconstruct Holocene-wide Human Ecodynamics

Who were the cave dwellers? This is essential to know as their life and death holds the key to a fundamental understanding of human and ecological developments during the Holocene of Northern Europe. Caves and rockshelters from coastal Norway form the ideal case study, as they showcase extensive use for habitation, rituals and funerals. Paradoxically, their scientific potential is severely underutilized, resulting from an enduring perception amongst lay persons and scientists alike of cave dwellers as primitive and marginal, and thus less relevant to research. 

This neglect of cave and rockshelter records represents a missed opportunity of significant proportions. Being protected and fixed locations that people repeatedly return to, caves and rockshelters facilitate the accumulation of stratified deposits with organic preservation which can be directly translated into time-series data and used to reconstruct change through time. This is extremely valuable, as it contrasts with most archaeological data which is derived from open-air settlements often lacking time-depth and organic remains. INDICAVE will investigate how caves and rockshelters in Norway were used and perceived, who used them, and how their use changed during the Holocene, 11.500-500 years ago. With an interdisciplinary, international team of scholars, the project will establish a national dataset of this sitetype, re-excavate key sites with cutting-edge methods, analyze archaeological, botanical and zoological data from important legacy cave and rockshelter sites, synthesize long-term enviro mental trajectories and ultimately investigate the contested relationship between natural shelters and open-air site records. Through combining the first, targeted aDNA-analysis of cave and rockshelter human remains with a battery of detailed archaeological and scientific methods, the project produces an innovative and spatiotemporally resolved indicator-grid to reconstruct long-term relationships between humans andcoastal ecosystems along a transect of the Norwegian coast.

Primary and secondary objectives:

The primary objective of INDICAVE is to explore how caves and rockshelters were integrated in the overall archaeological record of Holocene coastal Norway (11.500-500 cal BP). This will be studied through five secondary objectives: (1) Perform key-hole excavations and cutting-edge methods on four caves and rockshelters which are strategically selected to provide maximal spatiotemporal distribution along the entire Norwegian coast. (2) Explore the use(s) and role(s) of caves and rockshelters by analyzing their artefactual and faunal record, in comparison with open-air settlements. (3) Perform aDNA and isotopic analyses of cave and rockshelter human remains to construct a densely sampled Holocene transect of human demographic, dietary and genetic variability. (4) Compile the first national database of archaeological caves and rockshelters to evaluate their material record compared to open-air sites. (5) Construct an indicator-grid from the selected cave and rockshelter sequences and synthesize Holocene-wide long-term relationships between humans and coastal ecosystems.