THE NEKSELO FISH WEIR AND MARINE RESERVOIR EFFECT IN NEOLITHIZATION PERIOD DENMARK

The Neksele Wickerwork provides an unusually solid estimate on the marine reservoir age in the Holocene. The basis for this result is a 5200-year-old fish weir, built of hazel wood with a brief biological age of its own. Oysters settled on this construction. They had lived only for a short number of years when the fence capsized and was covered in mud and the mollusks suffocated. Based on the difference in radiocarbon (C-14) age between accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) samples of oyster shells and wood, respectively, the marine reservoir age for this site is estimated to 273 +/- 18 C-14 years. Re-evaluations of previously produced data from geological and archaeological sites of Holocene date in the Danish archipelago indicate marine reservoir ages in the same order as that of the Wickerwork. Consequently, we recommend the use of the new value, rather than the ca. 400 C-1(4) years hitherto favored, when correcting for the dietary induced reservoir effect in radiocarbon dates of humans and animals from the Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic periods of this region.

Automated summary

The Neksele Wickerwork provides a solid estimate on the marine reservoir age in the Holocene, based on a 5200-year-old fish weir. The marine reservoir age for this site is estimated to be 273 +/- 18 C-14 years, after calculating the difference in radiocarbon age between oyster shells and wood samples. Re-evaluations of geological and archaeological sites in the Danish archipelago suggest similar marine reservoir ages.