Modern approaches to the period have moved on from a narrow study of flint typology. The best of them, such as Christopher Smith’s Late Stone Age Hunters of the British Isles,5 view Mesolithic people as hunters who acted out their lives within very specific types of environment. Mesolithic communities often settled near rivers and lakes, not just for fishing, but because that was where animals came to drink, and the forest cover was not too dense. As we have already seen, groundwater levels generally rose during the postglacial period, with the result that many Mesolithic hunting camps and settlements became waterlogged.
Archaeologically, this was extremely important. In certain situations where there is not too much flow, waterlogging can prevent oxygen feeding the fungi and bacteria that promote decay. This can lead to the preservation of organic material which would not survive for more than a few decades under normal circumstances. Sometimes the things preserved by stagnant waterlogging can be amazingly delicate, ranging from hair, skin and hide to wood, leaves and even pollen grains. On a normal, dry site, well over 90 per cent of all ‘material culture’ – i.e. everything made and used by human beings – will vanish in a few decades, leaving only those archaeological stalwarts and near-imperishables, stone, flint, pottery and fired clay. Sometimes, if the ground isn’t too acidic, bone and antler will survive too. But on a wet site almost everything is capable of survival, although acidity can play strange tricks. A number of waterlogged bodies were found within Bronze Age oak coffins in Denmark. In some, clothes and footwear survived, but the skeletons themselves had vanished, eaten away by acid attack.6
Waterlogging also preserves the fragile remains of plants, insects and other creatures, large and small, that lived in or near the settlements occupied by prehistoric people. These waterlogged environmental remains can be analysed by various specialists, such as pollen analysts (or palynologists), botanists and experts in ancient molluscs or insects, to reconstruct the environment around the settlement. The principle lying behind these studies is Sir Charles Lyell’s doctrine of uniformity, which we encountered in Chapter 1; waterlogged ground often favours plants and creatures that are fussy about where they live. So, the combination in a single deposit of, say, species of water snail, rush and cowslip would indicate not only that it was wet for part of the year, but also that it dried out in summer.
Taking a broad view of the subject, Christopher Smith points out that although Mesolithic people may well have gathered plant foods to supplement their primarily meat-based diet, they were always far more hunters than gatherers, or indeed fishers. With the British climate being what it is, gathered plant foods alone wouldn’t even begin to supply the calories people require to stay alive for more than a short period.7 Having said that, the term ‘hunter-gatherer’ has been around so long that it has stuck. So I’ll continue to use it.
Grahame Clark’s excavations at Star Carr took place between 1949 and 1951, and revealed a remarkably well-preserved and partially waterlogged site, on the marshy fringes of a postglacial lake, which was occupied around 7500 BC.8 Since Clark’s excavations, the animal bones from the original dig, plus the area around Star Carr, have been closely examined by archaeologists and archaeological environmentalists, so that it now possible to put the site into a reasonably coherent regional context.9 This, of course, is necessary if we are to work out how hunters operated. It’s no good looking at just one spot in the landscape, because the prey, and with it the hunters, are obliged to move around.
Star Carr produced a wealth of information about hunting. It was also a site where antler – of both native species of British deer, red and roe – was worked to make a variety of barbed spearheads, the vast majority of which were not fitted with small flint barbs. Antler is tough stuff, and requires special tools and techniques to be worked efficiently. Many of the flint tools, borers and burins, were designed to score and bore through the antler in a technique known as groove-and-splinter, which produced long, thin and strong ‘blanks’; these could then be further modified to produce the finished spearhead. Most of the raw material for this mini-industry was brought to the site as antlers, rather than as deer on the hoof. So it is best to omit antlers when using bones from an excavation to estimate the range and number of animals that were hunted.
Tony Legge and Pete Rowley-Conwy have analysed the bones from Star Carr and have shown that over half, by weight, of meat came from wild cattle, followed by elk and red deer, with roe deer and wild pig bringing up the rear. It is suggested that the larger animals were hunted by stealth, rather than by large groups of hunters working a ‘drive/stampede’ system, which we saw at Stellmoor in Germany in the Final Upper Palaeolithic. Evidence to support the idea of stalking is provided by the remarkable discovery on the shoulderbones of two elk and one red deer of lesions produced by a flint-tipped spear or arrowhead. What makes them remarkable is that they had healed over. In other words, the three animals in question had each survived at least one attempt to hunt them before they were finally caught and killed.
The position of the wounds, at the shoulders, suggests that the hunters were aiming for the heart. If they missed, as often would have happened, they would have had to resign themselves to a long period of stalking, as the prey slowly bled to death.10 And of course sometimes the animals got away – maybe when night fell and the trail went cold. The fact that these three beasts had done so suggests that the animal population around Star Carr and the now-vanished Lake Flixton was more sedentary than usual. Alternatively, it might suggest a somewhat larger human population in the region, perhaps at certain times of the year. But whatever the explanation, it is not the sort of thing one would have expected to encounter much earlier, at places like Paviland or Boxgrove. It’s a sign, surely, that the general population was growing.
Smaller animals, including pine marten, red fox and beaver, were also taken, probably for their pelts. The hunters at Star Carr were most remarkable for having domestic dogs, which presumably were used for hunting and rounding up.11 I find it fascinating to think that my own Border collie sheepdog, Jess, when she rounds up ewes is behaving in a fashion that any Mesolithic hunter would immediately recognise.
I’ve mentioned that the site was positioned next to a lake, so how can we explain the lack of fishbones? The best theory to account for the absence of fish, particularly pike, a large freshwater fish that one might have expected to be found near Star Carr, is that they hadn’t recolonised this part of Britain after the very cold years of the last glaciation.12 The North Sea would still have been very cold, and it is doubtful whether the small prey fish that pike need to feed on would have been present in anything like adequate numbers. So in this instance the absence of fishbones may indicate an absence of fish. Unfortunately, however, the acidity of the peats at Star Carr is sufficient to degrade fishbone, so the question cannot be satisfactorily resolved one way or the other.
Star Carr was waterlogged, and produced large quantities of wood, but evidence for actual wood-working took some time to appear. And when it did appear it lingered on our kitchen draining-board for ages. I should perhaps point out that my wife, Maisie Taylor, is a specialist in prehistoric wood-working, and I have had to grow used to finding black, grimy and rather unpalatable pieces of ancient wood in the sink. It’s a part of our life.
The pieces in question were sent to Maisie by Professor Paul Mellars at Cambridge, who was writing up excavations he had carried out at Star Carr with Tim Schadla-Hall in 1985 and 1989. They had come across some pieces