Antlerworking practices in Mesolithic Britain

This article considers the long-debated and thorny issue of the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in Britain. The apparently polarised debate that has dominated this discussion is, we suggest, unhelpful, and rather than positing either total colonisation from abroad, or simple indigenous continuity, we propose a model where both incomers and autochthons had their part to play. To explore this further we trace continuities across the divide in practices of hunting and gathering, and place these alongside the demonstrable evidence for change.

European Journal of Archaeology, 2011

This article considers the long-debated and thorny issue of the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in Britain. The apparently polarised debate that has dominated this discussion is, we suggest, unhelpful, and rather than positing either total colonisation from abroad, or simple indigenous continuity, we propose a model where both incomers and autochthons had their part to play. To explore this further we trace continuities across the divide in practices of hunting and gathering, and place these alongside the demonstrable evidence for change.

World archaeology, 1979

The gatherer-hunter site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire was excavated over three seasons between 1949 and 1951 and published in a now classic monograph . The lithic industry recovered suggested affinities with the Maglemosean or Early Mcsolithic of northern Europe, and radiocarbon determinations date the site to the mid-eighth millennium b.c. Of even greater interest than the exceptional flint assemblage were the associated organic remains preserved by the waterlogged conditions of the carr. In addition to a substantial floor of untrimmed branches, these included rolls of birch bark, a wooden 'paddle' and numerous animal bones, amongst which the antler in particular indicated considerable industrial activity. The excavator and his colleagues argued that the faunal remains testified to a concentration of activity over the winter and spring, and thus the case for seasonal movement of human groups at the time was set on a seemingly sure footing. This paper discusses the nature of the site and the assemblage recovered and offers an alternative interpretation.

: Walker, J; Clinnick, D, ed. Wild Things 2: Further Advances in Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Research. Oxford: Oxbow, 2019

The relationship between people and deer has been a persistent theme within British Mesolithic Studies since the early twentieth century, and has been approached from a range of economic, ontological, cultural and chronological perspectives. Yet our understanding of the ways in which deer and people interacted has been undermined by a failure to recognise the plasticity of deer behaviour in different environments, and the variability of social contexts in which they might be encountered. This paper will seek to address this by considering the current body of knowledge concerning the ecology and behaviour of Cervus elaphus (Red deer), Capreolus capreolus (Roe deer) and Alces alces (Elk), and model the actions of these species within a range of different British Mesolithic environments. In doing so, it will create a platform for new discussions of the relationship between people and deer, in a way that affords the actions of the animals themselves an unprecedented level of agency.

Archaeologists of the Mesolithic period have long sought and struggled to interpret site evidence within a regional and seasonally structured model of interpretation. Such models of hunter-gatherer mobility, settlement and subsistence have struggled to uncover and exploit the productive tension between sites and regional archaeological records. This paper explores detailed studies of Earlier Mesolithic assemblages in northern England which share common stylistic and raw material traits. Particular emphasis is placed on establishing how the reduction of lithic materials was organised across the regional landscape and how such analyses of technological organisation can be understood as reflections of cost and/ or risk management in hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies. It reveals a chain of anticipatory lithic procurement, transportation, reduction, tool production and discard linking sites in the low lying Trent valley with upland valley and high elevation Pennine locations. A seasonally structured model of settlement, mobility and technological organisation is developed linked to a strategy in which autumnal hunting targeting established upland red deer rutting grounds by task groups served in managing community subsistence risks. This paper goes some way in demonstrating how the analysis of lithic organisation between waste assemblages for distinctive raw materials can provide an invaluable evidential basis for linking and interpreting site-based evidence at a regional scale.

Abstract Since publication of results of the seminal excavations of Grahame Clark at the Star Carr Mesolithic site it has been usual to refer to a specific type of modified red deer skull as an ‘antler frontlet’. These have been discussed as head gear perhaps used in the context of ritual activities. Further specimens broadly similar to those described by Clark were subsequently recovered from possibly contemporary localities in mainland north-central Europe and have been interpreted in the same way. Nevertheless, until the present day the focus of attention on this class of artefacts has been of an interpretative or even speculative nature and there has been no synthetic study of them in their entirety. This paper describes a research project designed to correct this state of affairs.

2009

At Clos de Poujol, dated from 8,300 to 7,200 cal. BC, thousands of small burnt fragments of Cervid antler were identified in the faunal material recovered from the sorting of the sieving. Only a very small number of items had initially been identified as part of a bone and antler industry and the proportion of Red Deer bone remains is very low in the faunal assemblages. How to interpret this situation? On the one hand, antlers -considered as a Cervid skeletal part -are relevant to any zooarchaeological study. On the other hand, they are of interest to the specialist of osseous industry as an exploited material (item or waste). As indirect evidence, these remains can help to understand the nature of archaeological deposits and the status of the site. A study of the osseous material integrating the economic, technological and contextual aspects provides clues on the ways to articulate the technological and economic systems. Our analysis documents a strategy of Red Deer exploitation characterized by two distinct procurement patterns: hunting of young females or stags in cast antler stage, on the one hand, and collecting of shed antlers, on the other hand. Such procurements, if embedded, could have taken place at the end of winter or during the spring. As it was not possible to reconstruct the whole chaîne opératoire (stricto sensu), assumptions were made, based on an assessment of the minimal number of antlers, the underrepresentation of antler tips and the composition of antler and bone industry, in order to figure out if shed antlers were brought to the site complete or not, how they were transformed (manufacturing and combustion process), and eventually if some parts were taken away.

Journal of Archaeological Science, 2012

In technological approaches to prehistoric industries, there is currently a renewed interest in the transformation of osseous materials. This approach requires the construction of a technical reference base of manufacturing stigmata, as well as of the procedures and methods used to produce tool blanks.

Foraging Assemblages Volume 1 Edited by Dušan Borić, Dragana Antonović, and Bojana Mihailović, 2021

Narratives of Mesolithic hunting strategies in Britain and wider north-western Europe have previously conceived of ‘red deer economies’, in which life revolved, to a great extent, around the procurement of this species. Such subsistence models have subsequently influenced models of seasonal transhumance and interpretations of site-use and flint assemblages. Although over the last 40 years the importance and exclusivity of red deer, and the suitability of subsequent models of movement and seasonality have been challenged, the species remains, to an extent, a symbol of Mesolithic hunting. This paper compares the frequency of species from four re-analyzed sites in southern Britain with those from previously analyzed sites in northern Britain and northern France to explore the geographical and temporal shifts in species killed during the Early Mesolithic. Moving beyond single-species monolithic hunting strategies and large-scale models of transhumance, the variety of species hunted highlights the need to consider Mesolithic hunting strategies that undertook a range of tasks and encountered numerous different species with changing local populations, within a mosaic of different environments.

Interpreting and explaining numerical variance in artifact assemblages has not played an important role in lithic analysis. As shown, this measure offers much to better understand prehistoric behavior. Variance in microlith assemblages is examined to test Myers' (1986, 1989b) model of changing hunting strategies across the Early to Later Mesolithic transition. It is shown that Early Mesolithic microliths are highly standardized relative to analogous items from the Later Mesolithic. This finding is related to the weapons design systems and how the production of microliths is embedded within seasonal activities. It is argued that Early Mesolithic microliths were produced in large numbers ahead of time within a reliable weapons system focused on intercept hunting, while Later Mesolithic microliths were produced in smaller batches, as needed, within a maintainable system optimized for encounter-based hunting.