Rivers

Abstract

With the global glacier retreat at the onset of the Holocene, unconstrained drainage systems gradually became colonized by a myriad of species, including humans who made their lives along flowing water. While Mesolithic research has been firmly embedded in the study of the environment, it was primarily conceptualized as a passive backdrop to human activity. In more recent times, the paradigm shift known as the Ontological Turn afforded new ways of thinking about actors and material worlds whose properties do not simply exist but emerge through mutually constitutive relationships. With their constant flow and ever-changing form, shaped by human agency and shaping human experience of the world, the rivers quite literally embody the vibrant nature of entanglement. In this chapter, rivers flowing through Mesolithic worlds are considered as socialized landscapes, mediums which afforded specific experiences and interspecies encounters, and as dynamic assemblages of beings and abiotic actors.