Komsa culture
Culture | Defunct
10000 BCE to 6500 BCE
The Komsa culture (Komsakulturen) is a stone age culture of hunter-gatherers that existed from around 10,000 BCE in Northern Norway.The culture is named after the Komsa Mountain in the community of Alta, Finnmark, where the remains of the culture were first discovered.
The term was first used by Norwegian archaeologist Anders Nummedal (1867-1944) after the discoveries he made in the Komsa Mountains during 1925.
The distinction between a "Komsa" type of stone-tool culture north of the Arctic Circle and a "Fosna" type from Trøndelag to Oslo Fjord was rendered obsolete in the 1970s.
Nowadays both phenomena are ascribed to different types of tools of the same culture.Archaeological evidence indicates that the Komsa culture was almost exclusively sea-oriented, living mainly off seal hunting and being able boatbuilders and fishermen.
In comparison to the southern Norway's contemporary Fosna variety of this same culture, stone tools and other implements appear relatively crude.
This has been explained with a paucity of flintstone in the region.
Related Events
Showing 1 events out of 1 total
The oldest finds are stone tools dating from 9,500 to 6,000 BCE, discovered in Finnmark (Komsa culture) in the north and Rogaland (Fosna culture) in the south-west.
However, theories about two altogether different cultures (the Komsa culture north of the Arctic Circle being one and the Fosna culture from Trøndelag to Oslofjord being the other) will be rendered obsolete in the 1970s.
More recent finds along the entire coast have revealed to archaeologists that the difference between the two can simply be ascribed to different types of tools and not to different cultures.
Coastal fauna provide a means of livelihood for fishermen and hunters, who may have made their way along the southern coast about 10,000 BCE, when the interior is still covered with ice.
It is now thought that these so-called "Arctic" peoples came from the south and followed the coast northward considerably later.