Late Glacial shaft-smoothers

This project takes a fresh look at a hitherto rather neglected object, the shaft-smoother. While working with a previously excavated Late Glacial assemblage from a Bromme culture locale at Møllehøje, northern Jutland, I discovered a shaft-smoother. This object type has not previously been known from the Late Glacial period in Denmark and not from the Bromme culture at all. I have since made an attempt to use the morphology of this object to assess both its most probable culture-historical affiliation as well as its specific function. In this connection, I am working with colleagues at AU Geoscience (Associate Professor Henrik Friis) and at GEUS (Erik Skovberg Rasmussen) to get an exact provenance of the raw material. If we can identify the source we can illuminate Late Glacial mobility and/or trade networks, as well as collect precisely the right material for replication experiments. Experiments with shaft-smoothers have not been systematically conducted before and would be able to shed much new light on the treatment of the usually not preserved organic components of prehistoric hunting weapons such as bows, arrows, and dart.