Bone spoons, un unknown category of fishing gear in Mesolithic Europe
Résumé
Found in Mesolithic sites still complete and even, sometimes, engraved with non-figurative motives, bone plates
are generally considered as adornment when they are also perforated (Lund 1951, Mikkelsen 1979). However,
they show the characteristics of the spoons-baits used with fishhooks for line fishing. This technical practice is
not even mentioned for the period even if the Mesolithic communities based part of their subsistence on the
capture of carnivorous fish, particularly in Norway. These species would be precisely the prey which was
targeted using this technical innovation that would thus appear with the Mesolithic. It is in order to discriminate
them from the other suspended osseous elements with which they share many attributes that the Norwegian
spoons-baits or flutters that we first recognized from the archaeological series of Viste and Seavarhelleren
(Bergsvik & David 2015) will be presented for the interest of the diagnosis.