Archaeologists located a Stone Age coastal settlement about 8 meters below the Bay of Aarhus and recovered artifacts from the seabed. An EU-funded, 13.2 million euro, six-year international project is mapping parts of the Baltic and North Seas seabed to uncover submerged Mesolithic landscapes as offshore wind farms and sea infrastructure expand. The site sits on an ancient coastline that was inundated after the last ice age when global sea levels rose, forcing hunter-gatherer populations inland. Excavations at Moesgaard Museum have opened about 40 square meters of the site and recovered animal bones, stone tools, arrowheads, a seal tooth, and worked wood.
This summer, divers descended about 8 meters (26 feet) below the waves close to Aarhus, Denmark's second-biggest city, and collected evidence of a Stone Age settlement from the seabed. It's part of a 13.2 million euro ($15.5 million) six-year international project to map parts of the seabed in the Baltic and North Seas, funded by the European Union, that includes researchers in Aarhus as well as from the U.K.'s University of Bradford and the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research in Germany.
Moe Astrup and colleagues at the Moesgaard Museum in Højbjerg, just outside Aarhus, have excavated an area of about 40 square meters (430 square feet) at the small settlement they discovered just off today's coast. Rising sea levels preserved history "like a time capsule" Early dives uncovered animal bones, stones tools, arrowheads, a seal tooth, and a small piece of worked wood, likely a simple tool.
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