Many wetland areas in Northern Europe have preserved relevant organic material, but the archaeological site of Hohen Viecheln (Germany) offers the exceptional preservation of part of an open-air lakeside settlement site much as it was during its long period of occupation in the Early Holocene. The analysis of production debris and artefacts discarded there amongst the refuse of consumption has provided evidence for a culturally-specific concept underlying the production of hunting/fishing gear. The major potential of this corpus of finds lies in the opportunity it presents for the comparison of the technologies employed at the site over time, and the broadening of such comparisons to contemporaneous sites that have yielded similar assemblages in neighbouring and more distant regions. On the basis of artefact morphology and fabrication techniques of artefacts made of the bones of butchered animals, Hohen Viecheln has become a key Postglacial (Early Mesolithic) site in the illumination of a unique technological tradition, the ‘northern technocomplex’, spanning the whole of Northern Europe west of the Baltic Sea during the Early Mesolithic, distinct from contemporary technologies of other Nordic regions, and those of eastern origin. The northern technocomplex, which represents a technological tradition that occurred in the bone manufacture in the western part of Northern Europe from the 9th to 8th millennia cal. BC, is marked by a strong diachronic consistency in artefact form and design over a period of about two millennia. Within it, Hohen Viecheln stands out for the relative crudeness of the barbed points that were probably used as leister prongs. An analysis of this unique technological trait raises two primary areas of further inquiry: 1) the relationship between the industrial domain and that of subsistence, when a single animal species served as a primary resource in both domains, and 2) the recognition of distinct cultural groups founded on a techno-stylistic variability as observed in the form of such projectile points. It is assumed here that Hohen Viecheln belonged to (a) subgroup(s) (Duvensee/Pritzerbe) of this northern technocomplex throughout the period of its occupation, with the addition of a Maglemosian component in its more recent phase. Without offering a conclusive explanation of the origin of this apparent technological transformation, from Duvensee/Pritzerbe to Duvensee/ Pritzerbe + Maglemose (autochthonous innovation, acculturation, import?), the study examines the Hohen Viecheln osseous industry in diachronic and regional context, and in comparison with contemporary assemblages from the neighbouring region of Zealand (Denmark), where the Maglemosian appears – technostylistically – as a more internally-consistent, monolithic entity. The results provide new evidence relevant to the old debate over the appropriateness of chrono-cultural seriation based solely on durable elements of material production and the implications for understanding the relationships between recognized postglacial cultural groups in this area of Northern Europe.