The Ertebølle culture (ca 5300 BCE-3950 BCE) is the name of a hunter-gatherer and fisher, pottery-making culture dating to the end of the Mesolithic period.

The culture is concentrated in Southern Scandinavia, but genetically linked to strongly related cultures in Northern Germany and the Northern Netherlands.

It is named after the type site, a location in the small village of Ertebølle on Limfjorden in Danish Jutland.

In the 1890s, the National Museum of Denmark excavated heaps of oyster shells there, mixed with mussels, snails, bones and bone, antler and flint artifacts, which were evaluated as kitchen middens (Danish køkkenmødding), or refuse dumps.

Accordingly the culture is less commonly named the Kitchen Midden.

As it is approximately identical to the Ellerbek culture of Schleswig-Holstein, the combined name, Ertebølle-Ellerbek is often used.

The Ellerbek culture (German Ellerbek Kultur) is named after a type site in Ellerbek, a community on the edge of Kiel, Germany.The Ertebølle culture was roughly contemporaneous with the Linear Pottery culture, food-producers whose northernmost border was located just to the south.

The Ertebølle did not practice agriculture but it did utilize domestic grain in some capacity, which it must have obtained from the south.The Ertebølle culture replaced the earlier Kongemose culture of Denmark.

It was limited to the north by the Scandinavian Nøstvet and Lihult cultures.

It is divided into an early phase ca 5300 BCE - ca 4500 BCE, and a later phase ca 4500 BCE - 3950 BCE.

Shortly after 4100 BCE, the Ertebølle began to expand along the Baltic coast at least as far as Rügen.

Shortly thereafter it was replaced by the Funnelbeaker culture.