Hang up to the hook! Manufacture and fishing practices at Mesolithic Olsteinhelleren, Norway

This paper discusses bone fishhooks from the Late Mesolithic Olsteinhelleren site excavation. Fishing activity marks a major turning point in the subsistence of hunter-gatherer groups between the 7th and 6th millennia cal. BC in southern Norway. Our study method, presented in detail, used a technico-functional approach based on a diacritical reading of the hook, its surface state and the manufactured overlapping areas. This reading enables us to reconstruct the manufacturing chaîne opératoire and to consider the chronological dimension of its realisation. Therefore, individual, and collective strategies were identified regarding the management of bone raw materials and the involvement of fishing activity in terms of technical practice and subsistence strategies. The fishhook production was embedded in other activities and was performed by production of standardised blanks which could have been stored and transported to summer fishing camps such as Olsteinhelleren, where hook shaping, and line maintenance were carried out. Looking both at the hook production and the wide amount of ichthyofaunal remains, we assume that these populations were practising a seasonal intensive fishing, possibly with a longline.