10. It Is the Technical Side of the Work which is My Stumbling Block: A Shell Midden Site on Risga Reconsidered

Mesolithic and later sites around the Inner Sound, Scotland

“…It was long thought that midden sites and open-air sites related to separate cultural branches of Mesolithic Scotland (Lacaille 1954) on the grounds of their differing lithic assemblages. Pollard, among others, suggested that this might be due more to site function, preservation and varying excavation techniques (Finlayson 1990a ;Pollard 1990; Bonsall 1996) and his excavations at Risga (Pollard et al 1996) were some of the first to try and resolve the problem. We now know that shell midden sites themselves vary considerably in date and function (see below; Hardy et al forthcoming b), but in brief many are associated with microlithic assemblages and it seems that they do sit quite happily within the main body of the Scottish Mesolithic as long as we accept that as a body it contained considerable variation.…”

“…The island of Oronsay is famous for its large mounded shell middens and these have been the subject of several investigations (for example Anderson 1898;Mellars 1987). Similarly, a midden site was found on Risga in the early 1900s and recently has been excavated again (Pollard et al 1996). The Oban area is also well known for cave sites with midden deposits, such as MacArthur Cave, the Druimvargie rockshelter, and Carding Mill Bay (Connock et al 1992;Pollard 1990).…”

“…To the north there are no known sites (though they presumably wait to be found). To the south Risga, on Loch Sunart, is well documented if as yet not properly interpreted (Pollard et al 1996). Ulva cave, on the small island of Ulva, off the coast of Mull, contains a midden site dated to between 7100 BC and 4100 BC (Russell et al 1995).…”

“…Early accounts of work at Risga indicated that a microlith might have been found in the midden, and recent excavations have located a microlithic lithic scatter beside the original location of the midden (Pollard et al 1996). At present, the relationship between the midden and the lithic scatter is not clear -nor is it clear whether enough of the site survives for excavation to determine this.…”

“…Their excavation was undertaken with the specific goal of recovering economic data, so that questions concerning some of the artefactual content, the immediate context of the sites and their relationship with other Mesolithic facies were largely left unexplored, though they have been picked up in more recent papers (for example Mellars 2004). In nearly all other cases excavations of west coast middens have either been carried out before the development of modern archaeological methods (most of the Oban sites, Pollard 1990; and early work at Risga, Pollard et al 1996), initiated by amateur projects (Raschoille Cave, Pollard 1990;Carding Mill Bay, Connock et al 1992), taken place where little survived of the midden (Carding Mill Bay 2, Connock et al 1992), or in less than ideal 'rescue' conditions (An Corran, Hardy et al forthcoming a). In eastern Scotland Coles' excavations at Morton (Coles 1971) provided a classic example of how to maximise the information from midden excavation, but the site lay in local isolation (and has since been destroyed), and there were few other published sites locally with which to provide a context.…”