The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

• 54 • Steven Mithen
seeds from Newferry, wild pear/apple from Mount Sandel and bog bean from Star Carr offer a
glimpse of the range regularly exploited.
Only hazelnuts, usually represented by fragments of their charred shells, have been found
in large quantities and on many sites. These were probably roasted to improve their flavour and
digestibility or to prepare a paste for ease of transport and storage; in this process, some were
burnt. The apparent importance of hazelnuts in Mesolithic diets is likely to be more than a
factor of preservation and recovery: as a highly nutritious plant food, they were probably
intensively exploited and regularly harvested. At sites such as Broom Hill and Staosnaig, hundreds
of thousands of charred nuts were deposited in large, circular depressions. As these nuts are
presumably only a fraction of those roasted, a very intensive exploitation of hazel trees in the
vicinity is implied, especially if, as at Staosnaig, such deposits formed over a number of years
rather than centuries.
The importance of plant foods in the diet may be indicated by the evidence for environmental
manipulation by igniting vegetation, which increases in frequency during the Later Mesolithic.
Firing may have been used to encourage plant growth, and been particularly valuable for hazel.
Management of plants may also be indicated by artefacts: amongst other purposes, antler mattocks
may have been used to break ground or to weed, so that edible wild plants could flourish.
The use of cereals?
Numerous pollen cores provide a further contentious aspect of Mesolithic plant use: the
exploitation, perhaps cultivation, of cereals. For example, at Cothill Fen, Oxfordshire, a single
Triticum type (wheat) pollen grain was found at a level dating to c.6,800 radiocarbon years BP
(Day 1991), while another cereal type pollen grain was identifed at a level dating to c.5,880
radiocarbon years BP at Machrie Moor, Arran. These may indicate Mesolithic groups experimenting
with growing non-indigenous cereals, but some specialists consider that the ‘cereal type pollen’
was either produced by native wild grasses, or occured in such early contexts due to contamination.
Unless cereal grains are found in well-dated, in situ Mesolithic contexts, it seems unlikely that this
issue will be resolved.
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION, IDEOLOGY AND THE HUMAN POPULATION
Depressingly little can be stated with confidence about the social organization of Mesolithic
hunter-gatherers in Britain, about which archaeologists remain unable to draw inferences from
records composed primarily of stone artefacts. Of course, this does not stop speculation, some
of which may be correct. For instance, Jacobi (1978) argued that in northern England during the
Earlier Mesolithic, two distinct social groups are represented by assemblages with specific
frequencies of particular microlith types, and differences in raw material usage. Subtle variations
in the retouch of obliquely blunted points, for example, are recognized. Such differences are
unlikely to have been functional and, since such equipment is too inconspicuous to have acted as
a means of social identification, may reflect largely unconscious social traditions unique to particular
human groups. A similar argument may be applicable to other distinctive artefacts, such as Horsham
points, found in discrete geographical areas and chronological periods.
Another route into prehistoric social organization is to consider the distribution of prestige
goods in order to identify patterns of exchange, but few such items are known. Perhaps the best
examples are shale beads, apparently significant artefacts of the Early Mesolithic. At Nab Head I
(Dyfed), over 600 have been found (David in Bonsall 1989), made from local material. This
seems to have been worked there, given the numbers of perforating tools, unperforated shale