archaeologists were pushing their studies back in time, bringing postglacial farming societies within their domain (Van Riper 1993; Grayson 1983; Gräslund 1987).

Although formally united as “prehistoric archaeologists” after 1863, the two groups of researchers still had little in common because of their different temporal foci and methods, and to an extent the division persists to the present day. In the later nineteenth century the jewels in the crowns of the two groups were, on one side, caves, containing complex stratigraphic sequences, stone tools, animal bones, and (if the researchers were lucky) spectacular paintings, and, on the other side, beautiful items of metal and jewelry, much pottery, and many visible monuments.

It is thus understandable that the Mesolithic, being postglacial but preagricultural and producing neither cave paintings nor monuments and metalwork, belonged nowhere and therefore had a difficult birth. Its very existence was denied by scholars such as French archaeologist gabriel de mortillet, whose “hiatus theory” claimed that Europe was unoccupied between the cave painters and the crop planters. This ignored events in denmark, where, as early as 1851, scholars recognized that certain shell heaps were the rubbish middens of a postglacial but preagricultural people (Steenstrup 1851); Havelse Mølle has the distinction of being the first recognized settlement of the period that would later be called Mesolithic.

Despite the repudiation of the hiatus theory, the Mesolithic period did not compare favorably to the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods. This was because of the Victorian evolutionary view that human progress moved through a series of ever higher “levels” of civilization. The hunter-painters of the Paleolithic were considered sufficiently impressive to be precursors to the agricultural barbarians of pre-Roman Europe. By contrast, the Mesolithic, with a simplified and diminutive technology and little or no art, looked like an uninteresting period of cultural retrogression. This view continued well into the twentieth century, not least of all in the dominating works of vere gordon childe. In the first edition of The Dawn of European Civilization, Childe wrote that “the contribution of [the mesolithic] to European culture is negligible. The hiatus is only recreated” (1925, 3). In the sixth and final edition of The Dawn, he was still writing of “cultures that are termed mesolithic because in time—but only in time—they occupy a place between the latest palaeolithic and the oldest neolithic cultures” (1957, 35).

The rest of this entry will examine the transformation of Mesolithic archaeology from the study of a retrogressive cultural stage into the study of hunter-gatherer adaptations in a diverse and changing landscape. Because of the extent of the change, the Mesolithic is arguably the best arena in which to examine changes in the theory and practice of European archaeology in the twentieth century.

From Hiatus to Behavior

The archetypal artifact of the Mesolithic is the microlith (the word simply means “small stone”). Larger items exist, but most Mesolithic sites contain numerous microliths, and many typological studies have been undertaken. Microliths amount to small blanks that may be mounted in a variety of tools. They are occasionally found as parts of arrowheads, such as the well-known example from Loshult in Sweden that used two, one as tip and one as barb (this item is widely illustrated, see, e.g., J.G.D. Clark 1975, fig. 12). Up to a dozen at a time are found mounted on larger spearheads or daggers (e.g., J.G.D. Clark 1975, fig. 43). None have been found in Europe mounted as sickles or other implements connected with plants, but their potential role in this connection has been stressed (J. G.D. Clarke 1976, fig. 2).

In 1932 Grahame Clark synthesized the British material in The Mesolithic Age in Britain, and he extended this to the mainland in The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe (1936). He argued that the major Mesolithic event was the spread of the Capsian-derived Tardenoisian culture into a Europe peopled by local groups descended from different Upper Paleolithic cultures. The Mesolithic cultures were interpreted as peoples, and the history of the Mesolithic was the history of their interactions and developments (J. G.D. Clark 1932, 93 ff.). The axe-using