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Can you sail in a dugout tree trunk?
Or hit a mark with a Stone Age hunter’s bow and arrow? A visit to the Ertebølle Stone Age Centre can provide the answer, taking you back 6000 years in time to the end of the Stone Age, when the Ertebølle culture populated the coast just a few hundred metres from the Centre. What did their settlement look like? Did the kitchen middens smell bad? What did they believe in? Did they walk around in the nude and enjoy a warm climate and a bountiful nature, or was life very hard? The reconstructed settlement at the Ertebølle Stone Age Centre answers these and many other questions - and leaves the rest to your imagination!
The Stone Age Centre works with experimental archaeology as well as the exhibition and excavation of flint tools, preparation and tanning of hides, etc. Stone Age tools from Indian cultures are also on display on certain occasions.
Ertebølle through history
Ertebølle is a small village but is well known in internationally archaeological circles despite its size and has lent its name, the Ertebølle Culture (c. 5000 - 4000 BC) to the historical period itself. The culture was discovered in the 1890s by the Danish National Museum when archaeologists excavated a gigantic heap of oyster and mussel shells near Ertebølle and discovered that humans had not only created the heap but had more or less lived on top of it. The concept of the “kitchen midden” gained credence in European archaeological literature due to the discovery of the Ertebølle Culture. Settlements established by this hunting and gathering culture have been found all over Denmark, Southern Sweden, and Schleswig-Holstein and along the North German Baltic coast.
The Centre portrays nature in and around Ertebølle around 6 - 7000 years ago and human life in a landscape where the sea was 5 to 6 metres higher than it is today, and where the primeval forest formed an impenetrable wall close to the coastline. The settlement display is also home to a number of archaeological finds from Ertebølle, particularly tools fashioned from flint and bone.
The Stone Age Centre is located in an unusually beautiful nature area overlooking Lim Fjord. It is just a few hundred metres from the Centre to Ertebølle Hoved with its steep drop to the fjords below.
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