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on the menu. Curiously shaped implements, made from the antlers of red deer, have also been
found. Their use is immediately obvious when you watch the staff at work in an oyster bar. They
are shaped exactly like the knives which, inserted between the two shells of an oyster, then twisted,
open it to reveal the silver-grey flesh inside. It is a sight to behold – as it must also have been for
the children of Oronsay, 8,000 years ago, for that is the date of the Oronsay midden.
The seasonality of the Oronsay middens has been discovered in a very curious way. As well as
huge numbers of mollusc shells, the middens also contain the bones of saithe, a relative of the
haddock that is still plentiful in the waters off the west coast of Scotland. The saithe grows rapidly
in its first years of life and the age of a fish can be worked out from, of all things, the length of the
ear bone or otolith. Otoliths within the same midden tend to be about the same length but there is a
big difference in average otolith size between one midden and the next. The conclusion is that the
middens marked different seasonal camps where the fish caught were at different stages of their
development. What we do not know is if Oronsay was a permanent home or, like Cramond, another
seasonal camp, occupied at the same time each year to take full advantage of the harvest of the sea.
Oronsay and its close neighbour Colonsay lie about 15 miles from the larger islands of Islay
and Jura, themselves 10 miles or so from the long finger of the Kintyre peninsula. Clearly, the
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers – an epithet to which we must surely add fishing – were well used to
making these quite substantial sea crossings between the islands and the mainland. No boats
remain, destroyed by millennia of decay, but they were probably made from animal skins stretched
across a framework of hazel branches. They would have resembled the coracle, still, just about,
used for fishing in the rivers of west Wales, and the more substantial curraghs of the west of
Ireland. Whatever they used, these boats were perfectly good enough for coastal work and island
hopping.
The sea has never been a barrier to the people of the Atlantic. It was their highway, just as the
Pacific was to the Polynesians. There are confirmed Mesolithic sites on many of the islands lying
off the west coast of Scotland, and where no evidence has yet been found there is a feeling among
archaeologists that, with more field work, every island will be shown to have been occupied, if
only for one part of the year. There is even indirect evidence, in the form of unusual patterns of soil
erosion, that the Mesolithics reached Shetland, which would have involved a voyage on the open
sea of 60 miles from Orkney, the nearest point. Valuable materials were also transported over long
distances by sea. Flint is unknown in Scotland and other stones were used for making tools.
Bloodstone quarried from the Isle of Rum, where there is a very early Mesolithic settlement, has
been found in many sites around the west coast. The Mesolithic was a time of plenty for those
bands who lived on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. There was ample food within easy reach,
both in the sea and in the dense woodland that lay behind the shoreline. It certainly wasn’t
crowded. One recent estimate puts the total population of the whole of the Isles during the
Mesolithic at less than 5,000.
There is one tantalizing fragment of evidence – a grain of wheat pollen from the Isle of Arran in
the Firth of Clyde – that the Mesolithics were already experimenting with growing their own plant
food, well before the arrival of agriculture proper. However, it is only with the arrival of farming
that the whole way of life begins to change. Curiously enough, despite the major effect this
transition from the Mesolithic lifestyle of thinly dispersed hunter-gatherers to full-blown farming
must have had on the early inhabitants of Scotland, there is a distinct lack of material evidence