The Mesolithic in Britain

Landscape and Society in Times of Change

Chantal Conneller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138790421
• eBook ISBN: 9781000475159
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Mesolithic in Britain proposes a new division of the Mesolithic period into four parts, each with its distinct character.

The Mesolithic has previously been seen as timeless, where little changed over thousands of years. This new synthesis draws on advances in scientific dating to understand the Mesolithic inhabitation of Britain as a historical process. The period was, in fact, a time of profound change: houses, monuments, middens, long-term use of sites and regions, manipulation of the environment and the symbolic deposition of human and animal remains all emerged as significant practices in Britain for the first time. The book describes the lives of the first pioneers in the Early Mesolithic; the emergence of new modes of inhabitation in the Middle Mesolithic; the regionally diverse settlement of the Late Mesolithic; and the radical changes of the final millennium of the period. The first synthesis of Mesolithic Britain since 1932, it takes both a chronological and a regional approach.

This book will serve as an essential text for anyone studying the period: undergraduate and graduate students, specialists in the field and community archaeology groups.

1 Hunting and gathering time Chronological frameworks and key themes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228103-1

The Mesolithic was a time of profound change: Houses, monuments, middens, long-term use of sites and regions, manipulation of the environment and the symbolic deposition of human and animal remains all emerged as significant practises in Britain for the first time. These developments occurred during a period when environmental change was, at times, rapid and transformed the appearance of a place over the course of its inhabitation. However, this is not the traditional picture of the Mesolithic. Instead, the period has been represented as homogenous: Hunter-gatherers focused on routine economic practises in an endlessly repeating seasonal round. Perhaps at best the Mesolithic is seen as shifting from a way of life based on hunting large terrestrial mammals in the Early Mesolithic (as at Star Carr) to marine adaptations in the Late Mesolithic (on Oronsay); here ‘the specific is abstracted to the general’ (Elliott and Griffiths 2018, 349) due to a perceived lack of evidence and reliance on the few sites with faunal remains. Poor chronological resolution has serious consequences for the period, perpetuating characterisations of the Mesolithic as timeless and unchanging. The poverty of our chronologies appears even more acute as recent ground-breaking advances have produced refined chronologies for adjacent periods (Bayliss et al. 2007; Jacobi and Higham 2011).

This book aims to shed new light on the temporality of the Mesolithic occupation of Britain: Tracing the ebb and flow of inhabitation, the structure of settlement practises and the appearance of new and distinctive ways of life during the period. Above all, we need to see the Mesolithic as a historical process in which new ways of life emerge that both build on and reinterpret past practises. I present here a new chronological scheme for the period, where the Mesolithic is divided into four parts. This new chronology for the Mesolithic is based on a modest radiocarbon dating programme, audit of existing estimates and archive research. This has permitted refinement of existing typochronological schemes that have been used to develop new understandings of the timing and duration of settlement forms and features across Britain between 9500 and 4000 cal BC. The Mesolithic saw the first long-term, uninterrupted occupation of Britain for tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years: The Mesolithic was the origin of qualitatively new forms of human relationship with place, as landscapes acquired long-term histories for the first time, and particular locations took on meaning through new social and ritual practises of construction and deposition.

The remainder of this introductory chapter will be concerned with time, or more properly, with periodisation. How have archaeologists and quaternary scientists, from those first to recognise the Mesolithic, created order from the particular detritus of the period: The lonely scatters of charcoal and stone tools on bleak moorlands, the pollen records of the peats, the lithic scatters of river valleys and sandy heathland and the rarer finds of animal bones and large structures?

Typological chronologies

The concept of the Mesolithic – as a hiatus between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic – was first mooted in the late 19th century and became linked with microlithic industries following the work of Piette at Mas d’Azil in 1895 (despite the fact that these industries eventually proved to be neither Mesolithic nor truly microlithic). The Mesolithic only really gained common currency in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, when further fieldwork had been undertaken and the first writers of syntheses were able to take account of richer continental comparators (Burkitt 1926; Childe 1925; Clark 1932). Since then, a number of typological differences have been noted in the form of stone tools, more specifically microliths (see Box 1.3 for definitions and a discussion of the significance of these tools). Microliths have been the focus of these endeavours because they are found on most sites and, in contrast to other tool types, display considerable variation. This has been interpreted in different ways: Some variation, from work of the earliest researchers onwards, has been seen to have a temporal basis, but at other times different styles have been seen as contemporary, the product of different regional signatures, or more explicitly different groups of people with different styles of armature. There has even been a resurgence in explanations that equate microliths with people in recent years, returning full circle to the interpretations that established the Mesolithic in the 1930s.

The first to notice variation within the British material was the pioneer of Mesolithic studies, Francis Buckley (Box 1.1). In the course of his extensive fieldwork in the Central Pennines (Buckley 1921, 1924) he noted two distinct types of microlithic industry, which were found at different stratigraphic levels and thus considered to have a temporal basis. Buckley christened these broad blade and narrow blade (Figure 1.2), based on the width of the microliths recovered (Switsur and Jacobi 1979). Subsequent work suggests the former have a width of greater than 7 mm, while the latter are 5 mm wide or less (Pitts and Jacobi 1979). While it is clear Buckley’s definition refers to microliths, Preston (2012) argues he implicitly included laminar debitage in his assessment of his material. Initially the ‘narrow blade’ industries were thought to be earlier on the basis of their supposed greater depths at Warcock Hill (Petch 1924; Woodhead 1929). Clark (see Box 1.2 noted their correct position, though labelling the microlith forms ‘non-geometric’ and ‘geometric’, respectively. He drew parallels between these types and those in particular continental industries: Non-geometric types were found in the Southern Scandinavian Maglemosian, while geometric types were similar to the French Sauveterrian (Clark 1932). This division between these microlith types was confirmed through cluster analysis of microlith types from a wide range of assemblages across England and Wales by Jacobi (1979). Jacobi, working with Roy Switsur, linked these clusters to radiocarbon dated samples (see below), confirming their hypothesised temporal patterning (Switsur and Jacobi 1979).

Box 1.1 Francis Buckley (1881–1948), pioneer of Mesolithic research

Francis Buckley (Figure 1.1) came from a wealthy Yorkshire family and, before the First World War, practised as a barrister. His experiences in the war shaped Buckley as an archaeologist (Griffiths and Saunders 2020), for in France he encountered stone tools. He took to scouring the spoil heaps from the excavated trenches for Prehistoric remains, a task that left him dangerously exposed. In the war, he served as an ‘Observer’, working with maps and monitoring enemy movements to direct shelling. The skills he developed in producing military landscape sketches and trench plans formed the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Hunting and gathering time: Chronological frameworks and key themes
• 2 Pioneers in the north: Preboreal and Early Boreal settlement, 9500–8200 BC
• 3 The Early Mesolithic colonisation of the South: Deepcar and the Early Boreal Mesolithic 9300–8200 BC
• 4 A new way of living: Pits, hazelnuts, places and the ancestors in the Middle Mesolithic, 8200–7000 BC
• 5 The forgotten people: The Late Mesolithic, 7000–5000 BC
• 6 The last hunters: The Final Mesolithic, 5000–4000 BC
• References
• Index