Geophysical data: Duvensee GPR 2016

We investigate the landscape development of the early Mesolithic hunter-gatherer sites of Duvensee performing a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) Survey. We present for the first time a three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of the palaeoenvironment of 63 ha covering subarea of the former lake during the Mesolithic. The archaeological aims focus on detecting the location of former islands hosting hunter-gatherers settlements and on reconstructing the ancient landscape development for understanding prehistoric land use. Clusters of Mesolithic camps have been found located on small sand hills that formed islands in the prehistoric lake. For this environment, we present depth maps of the three most important sedimentary facies interfaces of ancient Lake Duvensee. Stratigraphic information from the corings enabled us to create a 3D model of the spatio-temporal development of the Duvensee bog. The locations of the islands and their estimated dive-up times agree with the spatio-temporal pattern of the previous archaeological finds. The model shows where hunter-gatherers could settle and move from one island to another following the shorelines of the overgrowing lake.