Shifting Shores and Stone Age Settlement: The Former Ventspils Lagoon Area, Latvia

This article considers a newly developed model of Holocene shoreline displacement in the southern part of the former Ventspils Lagoon of the Baltic Sea basin (present-day western Latvia) in relation to data from previous and new archaeological research in the area, assessing the changing pattern of Stone Age settlement and resource utilisation during the Mesolithic and Neolithic. An extensive lagoon was formed at the time of the maximum level of the Ancylus Lake and once again during the Littorina Sea maximum. In the south of the lagoon, the former shores from the two separate phases of the lagoon’s existence lie at similar elevations, providing the conditions for site re-occupation. There were river mouth sites on the continental shore of the lagoon and island sites on the seaward side, whereas in the periods with a low water level, human settlement focused on the relict waterbodies and watercourses within the exposed low-lying terrain of the former lagoon bed. The water-level fluctuations and resulting landscape changes were much more rapid during the Ancylus stage, the loci of settlement and resource exploitation necessarily shifting at fairly short intervals. The two lagoon phases also represent rather different aquatic environments.