Approaches to Interpreting Mesolithic Mobility and Settlement in Britain and Ireland

Abstract

The Mesolithic communities of northwest Europe have generally been considered inherently mobile, and all the material evidence associated with them has been interpreted accordingly. This has resulted in entrenched, theoretically polemical and largely hypothetical mobility models, focusing on seasonal rounds and extraction activities. However, recent reanalyses of the ethnographic sources, and discoveries of both substantial and ephemeral Mesolithic structures, as well as new data from recent innovative lithic and scientific analyses (including DNA, isotope research on human remains, and geochemical analyses of lithic artefacts), have forced us to rethink the rather static models of Mesolithic mobility strategies. This paper, examining Mesolithic hunter-gatherer mobility and settlement models from Britain and Ireland, is part of that reassessment. In particular, it assesses the impact of the multiple lines of consilience on our understanding of Mesolithic habitation of landscapes. These include the archaeological evidence and the efficacy of recent theoretical and methodological approaches that have been employed to interpret it.

Multi-profile fine-resolution palynology of Late Mesolithic to Bronze Age peat at Cat Stones, Rishworth Moor, Central Pennines, UK

“…Bronze Age sites are more diverse, including burial monuments, metalwork, pottery, circular enclosures and rock art, indicating a significant occupation of the landscape. Late Mesolithic sites (Barnes, 1982; Wymer, 1977) are abundant at altitude (Figure 1, Section B), and Rishworth Moor lies within the main Pennine distribution area for Late Mesolithic flint microliths (Keighley, 1981; Preston, 2013a, 2013b; Preston and Kador, 2018; Radley et al, 1974; Spikins, 1999; Stonehouse, 1987; Switsur and Jacobi, 1975; Wymer, 1977). These flint scatters were temporary hunting camps within a larger hunter-gatherer territory (Preston, 2013a, 2013b).…”

Neolithization and Population Replacement in Britain: An Alternative View

“…It has sometimes been suggested that the later Mesolithic communities of Britain were not only isolated, but sparsely distributed and culturally impoverished (see, for example, Miles 2016). In all probability there was considerable variation in patterns of settlement, mobility and subsistence during this period (Preston & Kador 2018), although a picture of very numerous small sites that had been repeatedly returned to is quite widespread throughout much of Britain, in a variety of different environments (Champness 2014; Simmonds et al 2019, 52; Waughman 2017, 12; Wickham-Jones et al 2020). However, there are also sites like Stainton West in Cumbria (Brown 2021) and Blick Mead in Wiltshire (Jacques & Phillips 2014, 24), which attest dense accumulations of population and appreciable logistical sophistication.…”

No pottery at the western periphery of Europe: why was the Final Mesolithic of Britain and Ireland aceramic?

“…Conventionally, archaeological understandings of hunter-gatherer mobility hinge on fixed, cyclical patterns of annual movement (the seasonal round), and dichotomies between either the regular movement of ‘base camps’, or task-specific mobility, which ‘maps on’ to natural resources (residential/logistical mobility). These have been soundly critiqued within both anthropology and studies of the British and Irish Mesolithic (Kelly 1995; Spikins 2000; Preston & Kador 2018). The only robust case study on late fifth-millennium cal BC mobility in Britain comes from Oronsay, in the Inner Hebrides.…”