The Ancients - Britain After the Ice Age: Star Carr

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

Over 13,000 years ago, Britain emerged from the ravages of the Ice Age as a changed land. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who had adapted to cold climates were presented with new opportunities by the retreating glaciers that could transform the way they lived. But what do we actually know about these people? What can the archeology tell us about Britain after the Ice Age?In this episode of The Ancients Tristan Hughes is joined by archeologists Dr Nick Overton and Dr Barry Taylor to talk about the discovery of Mesolithic artefacts at Star Carr - the site of a prehistoric lake settlement in North Yorkshire - and what they can tell us about how some of Britain’s oldest inhabitants might have lived. This episode was produced by Joseph Knight and edited by Peter DennisWe need your help! We’re working on something special and we need your questions about the Roman Empire. Let us know here.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code ANCIENTS - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we're talking about the end of the Ice Age in Britain and what happened next. we're talking about the end of the Ice Age in Britain and what happened next. Now roughly 12,000 to 11,000 years ago, Britain entered a period known as the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age. It's commonly referred to as a time of hunter-gatherer communities that roamed across Britain. And this period lasted for several thousand years before the introduction of

farming and the start of the following Neolithic in around 4000-3500 BC. But what do we know about Mesolithic Britain and its people? Well, the surviving archaeology is quite sparse, but there is one site that has revealed an incredible amount. It's called Star Carr, dating to roughly 9000 BC. Situated in North Yorkshire in the Vale of Pickering, Star Carr's waterlogged soils have allowed organic Mesolithic artefacts to survive. There's evidence of wood carving, of antler cutlets and so much more. This was a Mesolithic lakeside settlement. To explain all our guests today are the archaeologists Dr Nick Overton and Dr Barry Taylor, who have

both conducted extensive research not just on Star Carr, but also nearby Mesolithic sites in the Vale of Pickering such as No Name Hill. I really do hope you enjoy. Here's Nick and here's Barry. Nick, Barry, it is wonderful to have you both on the podcast today. Hello, nice to be here. Yeah, lovely to be here. Now, Mesolithic Britain, just post Ice Age Britain. This is a really exciting topic.

I'm so happy that we got both of you on to talk about this because Starcar, this is an exciting site that gives us an amazing insight into life in Britain immediately after the Ice Age. Yeah, I mean, it's incredible. And it's held this really pivotal place in the study of the Mesolithic in Britain, really, as well. It's the first site that was discovered where not only did you have stone tools, but you had really large assemblages of animal bone, of objects made of bone and antler, and a material that also preserves evidence for the environment. It's the first time that any archaeologists were able to try and reconstruct aspects of not just a sort of Mesolithic life on a small scale but fit it into sort of the changing environments of the time. So

the site was originally excavated by a guy called Graham Clark. It was actually discovered a few years earlier by an archaeologist based in Scarborough called John Moore. Clark at that time he was a lecturer in archaeology at Cambridge. He'd just done this PhD, basically in British Mesolithic, which at that time consisted mostly of stone tools. And I think by the end of his PhD, as all of us are, he was just so bored with the subject of his own PhD, which was stone tools. And he was working, he's also had lots of contacts with people on the continent as well. And he was aware of these excavations that had been going on in Scandinavia in northern Germany in peat bog sites which because

of the nature of the peat that accumulates around these sites so they're ancient wetlands that are filled up with this organic sediment called peat that sediment preserves organic materials so bone antler wood plant remains so you can not only see what people are making out of plants you can reconstruct the environments and he was aware of all these excavations and i think he just looked at britain and just went oh god this is boring i just need something more so he sort of set out really to find a site that had this levels of organic preservation so that he could trial i think the methods he was seeing done on the continental mainland in

northern Europe. And so there's a really famous quote in his excavation report from Starr Carr, where he talks about receiving this package of flints from John Moore, who said, I've just found this site. And he just talks about his excitement of realising when he looks at the flint tools, he can tell that they're early Mesolithic. So he goes up to Yorkshire, meets John Moore. John Moore has already put, at Clark's request, a small trench at the side of one of the field barringes at star car where he could see the pieces of animal bone and antler eroding into the edge of this sort of field drain that was being cut through the peat and i think clark describes him as looking a bit like old slippers but uh then he goes out and basically over three years digs these series of large trenches

into what would have been the edge of this ancient lake through these peat deposits and he just finds this absolutely amazing assemblage of animal bone he's got objects made of antlers particularly these projectile points made of pieces of red deer antler that got like a sort of barbs along the edges uh these headdresses or certainly what they call red deer antler frontlets so modified red deer skulls the antlers have been cut down and yeah he assumed these have been worn he's got lots of stone tools he's got what he thinks is a platform at the edge of the lake it's just everything he wanted was there in these trenches and he published the site very quickly

he worked i mean nick will tell you more, but he really revolutionized the idea of integrating the study of the animal bones with the stone tool assemblages. He had Harry Godwin and Donald Walker, who were the pioneering archaeobotanists of the time, who were using the plant material to reconstruct not just the environment around Star Carr, but also around the whole of this landscape. Tie it into this really early, really developing sequence of how the environment had changed at the end of the last ice age and it was really incredible he publishes it within a few years really i think he puts most of us to shame he published it within about three years this amazing account of life at star car and it just set the scene for really how the mesolithic certainly the early mesolithic of england was really understood for the rest of the 20th century, really. It is such a jewel of an archaeological site.

I mean, Nick, how rare is it to have a site surviving with so much extraordinary archaeology dating back to this time, some 11,000 years ago? time, some 11,000 years ago. So when, as Barry said, Clark was doing his PhD, which was published in 1932, there really weren't any early Mesolithic sites with any animal bone recovered at all. So it was all stone tools. And Clark was trying to sort of explore what you could say about people in the past with stone tools, but he was really desperate for a site with organic preservation. You can see at the end of his PhD that he's got an an appendix and the appendix is just a one sheet page and it's got an illustration of a barbed antler point it's known as the kalinda point and it's a point that has been dredged up off the north sea bed by a fishing trawler called the kalinda where apparently the captain of the boat pulled up the fishing nets

and there was a lump of what they describe as moorlog which is one of the peak deposits that are now on the floor of the north sea but would have once been terrestrial sort of like wetland landscapes when the sea levels were much lower and all of the north sea was dogger land the land connecting britain to europe and he says he goes to dislodge it from the net with a spade he hits it with a spade and he hears a really kind of hard not quite metallic clink but he hits something solid breaks this moor log open in half and there's a whole barbed antler point sitting in there and the way that clark talks about this in his PhD, he seems so enamoured with it. And I think it's because you've got these excavations going on in other parts of Northwest Europe, especially in Denmark,

where they've got this amazing organic material culture and animal bones, that this is what drives him on to find a site that is comparable, if not in material, at least in preservation. a site that is comparable, if not in material, at least in preservation. And he does a tour and he looks at a few different sites. So when John Moore gets in contact with him, you can realise why he's so excited about this, because it's really something he's been searching for for decades. And then to find it at Starcar, there were one or two small excavations that happened before Starcar that had some organic preservation, but not really a lot. And most of those were quite mixed. So it looks like after Mesolithic activity had happened, other things had happened, mixed everything up, which for archaeologists, it makes it really

difficult to understand exactly what's going on and exactly how the remains relate to human activity. The joy with Starchar is that all of that material was deposited and left there in the early Mesolithic as you say like 11,000 years ago and then it simply sat there and it was swallowed up by the peat that's forming in the lakes and then it was only when Graham Clark went back in the 1940s that it saw the light of day again and that is in archaeology terms, we describe that as in situ. So something that remains where it is since it was left there by people in whatever period we're studying. And that is the context which gives us most information because we can not just say what it is, where it might be from. We can also start thinking about why people are doing certain

things in certain places, what that might mean in terms of their daily lifestyle or their seasonal activities or their life ways. So really, it absolutely opened the door on saying brand new things about this period, which just stone tools on their own didn't. And of course, we had animal bones and we had organic material and there was wood at Starcar as well, which let Graham Clark start saying things about the species that people were hunting, the amount of different species people were hunting, maybe those species that people

weren't hunting as much, maybe the different ways that animals were being used. And then it started to get him thinking about what it means in terms of where humans were going in the landscape, or maybe where they weren't, what their hunting practices might have looked like, what their seasonal lifestyles might have looked like, were they going to certain places at certain times of the year. And Graham Clark suggested that red deer were probably going to be seasonally migrational at that period of time. So he then suggested that maybe people in the Mesolithic were following red deer around the landscape during the year. Now, more recently, we think that that's probably not the case because red deer that live in forested environments tend to stay in the forest year round. So although not everything that he said was necessarily what we think today,

what was amazing is that he was really pushing the boundaries of what could be said about people's lives in the past using this organic material. And it was a watershed moment for the way that we study animal bones in archaeology. It's one of the moments that gives birth to the study of zooarchaeology, which is the archaeological study of animal bones. Before that, a lot of the time, animal bones were looked at by zoologists, not zooarchaeologists. So it's an amazing site that not only expands our understanding of the period, it has a really pivotal moment in the development of the study of prehistoric archaeology in Britain and more broadly. So it's super important.

Super important, and we'll definitely delve into those animal bones in due course. We mentioned words there such as early Mesolithic and post-Ice Age, but very quickly, Nick, just a bit of an addition to that. What do we mean when we say the word Mesolithic? So Mesolithic is a period name that we use as archaeologists to kind of split up the past into usable chunks. So it doesn't necessarily mean that everybody in the Mesolithic was the same. We're not thinking about a single identity. We're not even thinking necessarily that they're genetically all the same. What we're talking about is a period of time. And that period of time is

from the end of the last ice age, so broadly around about 9,500 BC. And then in Britain, the Mesolithic ends when the Neolithic begins. And so the Neolithic arrives in Britain around about 4000 BC, maybe slightly earlier, where we get our earliest, what we would describe as typically Neolithic, and I'm using air quotes here, Neolithic technology. So we're looking at domestic plants, domestic animals, the first pottery. These are the kind of signatures of Neolithic activity. So these come in just before 4000 BC. So the Mesolithic is a period of time.

It's, you know, five and a half thousand years long. And what's amazing is that you think the length of time between the start and the end of the Mesolithic, so nine and a half thousand BC to 4000 BC, is almost the same length of time from the start of the Neolithic to now. So it's an expansive period of time. It's huge. And we are seeing groups of humans. They have organic materials. So we're looking at material culture made of bone and antler. We're seeing things made out of wood, having them use things made out of maybe skin and furs and bark and plant textile materials. But because of preservational issues, it's a long period of time for these very delicate things to survive.

We haven't got any physical evidence of things like plant textiles or skin. But given the fact that they don't have ceramics at that time, they don't have metals. So you can imagine that organic materials played a really, really important part in their material culture in their daily life. And so there are no domestic plants, no domestic animals. So we would describe them as living a life way that is hunter, fisher, gatherer. So they're moving around the landscape, maybe using a patchwork or a network or a mosaic of different sites that allow you to do different kinds of things, gather different kinds of plant materials, both nutritionally and for kind of material culture, different places that have

different animal species living there, some of which you're going animal species living there some of which you're going to be hunting some of which you're maybe not going to be hunting some of which you're going to be hunting larger numbers some smaller numbers it depends entirely on what they're using them for so you can see groups moving around networks of places doing all of these kinds of activities well hunter fisher gatherers after the Ice Age and it's fascinating therefore that Starkar dates to this very early period in the Mesolithic in Britain. I mean, Barry, if you visit Starkar today, I must admit I've never been in person. You have to invite me up one day. I have to have a look. But it looks quite, I mean,

lots of fields in the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire. But 11,000 years ago, roughly 9,000 BC, what do we think this whole landscape, this whole environment looks like? Would it have looked very different? Yeah, completely. So like you say, the modern landscape is an agricultural landscape. It sits on the eastern end of a large valley. So we've got the North York Moors on one side, the the yorkshire walls on the other side not far from the coast and it's very sort of flat and it looks quite a featureless landscape and essentially it's a drying out peat bog so the last few hundred years it's been increasingly drained to bring into agricultural usage if you go back to the mesolithic so if we're

looking at star car around about 9300 roughly is the earliest activity there. By that point, the landscape is dominated by this enormous lake, which we call Lake Flixtham. The lake's about five kilometres long, about two and a half kilometres wide. So it's a really substantial body of water. There's a couple of islands in the lake. And then the lake shore is this really sort of complex arrangement of low hills, peninsulas and sort of lagoons that are sort of branching off and feeding into the area around the shore and you've probably got a few centuries between the start of the Mesolithic and the very end

of the Ice Age so in that time the climate warmed very very quickly and plants recolonized the landscape, they recolonize the lake so certainly by the time mesolithic humans were present at Starkar you've got really extensive areas of reed beds and sedge beds really rich mosaic of wetlands that are forming around the sort of the shallow lake margins you've got plants like water lilies and pond weeds and water mill foils in the deeper parts of the lake and then as you go up onto the water's edge you've got trees like willow aspen growing right on the lake shore and then it's expanding out into as you go onto the dry ground into a forest which is predominantly

birch so birch with some willow and aspen forming the main components of the forest itself everyone knows what a birch tree is you know they're not like oaks they're not these massive canopy forming trees they've got quite small branches quite small leaves so they create a really open type of woodland environment there's lots and lots of light reaching the the woodland or the forest floor and so you get lots of ferns you get lots and lots of understory vegetation you get some small shrub species growing in amongst that so you've got this developing forest so the forest develops over probably within another couple of hundred years of people being at star cast so there's a lot of trees there and then the forest is becoming more expansive these massive areas of wetlands that are forming around the edge of the lake so really

really different to now and then that environment changes throughout the mesolithic so what happens is all those plants that are growing in the lake as they die the plant material starts to decompose but it doesn't decompose fully it starts to accumulate within and around sort of the lake basin so inside the lake or the base of the lake under the water you start to get this organic material accumulating and gradually that turns into this deposit that we call peat and that makes essentially the lake gradually gets shallower and it gets smaller so it's most pronounced around the edges of the lake so as these peat deposits build up the lake gets shallower around its edges it

gradually gets shallower within the basin the edges of the lake start to terrestrialize so what would have been open water with reed beds in it when people first arrived at Starkar, by the time people leave Starkar, which is about 800 years later, those deposits around the lake edge are now building up above the level of the water. You've got trees, particularly willow trees, growing in on what would have been areas of reed swamp. The reed swamp is then shifting into the basin and the lake's gradually contracting. And then through the course of the Mesolithic, that carries on until the lake is no longer there. And it's just this huge, really rich, expansive wetland.

And at the same time as that's happening, during the time people are at Starcar, what would have been the dry ground around the shore also starts to waterlog. what would have been the dry ground around the shore also starts to waterlog so the build-up of these sediments at the lake edge starts to make the area around the lake shore get damper and then peat forming environments start to expand over the dry ground so the peat has not only infilled the lake but it's also buried much of the mesolithic landscape

so when you go there today you really just see the sort of humps and bumps around the landscape and they would have been islands and peninsulasumps and bumps around the landscape and they would have been islands and peninsulas and little hills around the lakes and things like that but yeah if you go back to the early part of the mesolithic you get this massive lake and then it's just this very long history of the lake gradually infilling a process we call hydroserial succession and that just brings a whole load of different sort of environments into the lake and then at the same time as that happens towards the end of the time that people are at Starkar we start seeing

hazel trees arrive so hazel I suppose they've been hanging out in more the sort of southern parts of Europe particularly sort of the end of the last ice age getting these refugia of trees that don't particularly like very cold climates birch is quite hardy so colonizes northern Europe first and then by the time people are abandoning star car we're starting to see hazel trees maybe a little bit of ash in the landscape there's some beach trees and then during the latter part of the mesolithic we get the broadleaf deciduous species so the trees that we're familiar with as forming forests in britain today so that's when we get oak el elm, ash and lime. And towards the

latter, sort of second part of the Mesolithic, they start to dominate the forest. So the birch woodland that we have in the very early Mesolithic disappears and is replaced by this really dense, really quite dark, broadleaf deciduous forest. So it's a period of really sort of dynamic environmental change. You've got these successions of different plant communities that are coming into northern Europe. The climate's still quite unstable. We see various climatic fluctuations at the time as well. That's obviously affecting animal populations. So certainly before people arriving at Starcar, but after the end of the last ice age, you've got herds of wild horse in the landscape. They seem probably to have gone extinct by the start of the mesolithic maybe

into the early mesolithic you get other species so there would have been reindeer towards the end of the last ice age we don't have them in the mesolithic and then the species that we would have their behavior starts to change as the environment changes so it's this really sort of dynamic changing period that humans are living at sites like Star Carr. So these humans are living at the site of Star Carr with all of these various fauna and various types of vegetation there, and you mentioned all of this woodland that would have been there too, Barry, or Nick, whoever wants to come in with this, because I'd like to ask, therefore, keeping on wood, normally when we think of great structures of deep and prehistory, maybe we think of the massive monumental stone buildings of the Neolithic or something like Stonehenge or Orkney.

monumental stone buildings of the Neolithic or something like Stonehenge or Orkney but do we have any evidence for quite sizable structures from Starkar from where these people were living? Yeah so if we go back to Clark's excavations Clark excavates what he describes as a brushwood platform so it's a load of branches and birch trees that have been cut off the sides of trees and thrown down into the lake to form like an occupation surface at the wetlands when we did the larger scale excavations at starkart one of the things we discovered is that his brushwood platform is actually just a natural accumulation of wood it's just literally branches from trees that have fallen in but what we did find was a series of really substantial wooden trackways or platforms there's three main ones there's an

early but there's actually four there's an early sort of precursor which looks like it's lots and lots of wood that's been put down onto the base of the lake at the lake margins probably in order to sort of stabilize the sediments so that people can walk out and access areas of deeper water there's lots of unusual deposition take place around that. Then a few centuries later, we get the first of three massive timber platforms. The first one is really enormous. We excavated, I think, about a 12-metre stretch of it, and it showed no sign of ending at the edge of our trench. It was a really huge thing. It was two layers of split wood, so people had taken whole tree trunks. They'd driven wedges into them in order

to split them even to halves or into quarters and they've laid these down then there was a layer of whole trees that was sort of laid down diagonally over the top of it and then another layer of split wood on top of that now when we excavated it obviously it had thousands of years of peat compressing it down but even when we excavated it must have been almost a foot thick in places um nick is nodding profusely at that so it seems in agreement it was a chunky thing but yeah in the mesolithic that must have been a very very big structure and for the radiocarbon dating we know it's built in one phase so it's not accumulated it's been built like that and like i said that's going off from the shore at an angle seems to be heading into open water and it's huge and that's the first of

three major wooden platforms or trackways that are built the two others are built sort of after the first one goes out of use we get the second one then a third one built maybe another 100 years later they're also quite large they're not as big as the central one when you just think I suppose of the amount of effort that that takes I can't quite remember the top of my head how many trees were just in the excavated bit but I think it's like 25 or something like that it might be less but it's large number of trees had to be felled just to build the section that we excavated and that's a communal feat that involved people coming together and working together to do that. I mean you think that it's not just the people that are felling the trees and the people having to drag these things through areas of woodland. One thing that's

interesting is they're not utilising the trees that are growing at the edge of the lake. Trees at the edge of the lake have got quite a twisted grain, they've got lots of side branches. So Mike Bamford that did all the wood analysis, he showed that there's a difference in the types of trees that were growing at the edge of the lake to the ones that they use for making the platforms so they're having to go into areas of fairly dense tree cover to find trees that are growing very straight that don't have lots of side branches on them they're undoubtedly felling them we don't have much direct evidence of felling but you know unless the trees walked into the lake they must have been felling them. We don't have much direct evidence of felling, but unless the trees walked into the lake, they must have been felling these trees.

They're dragging these things through into the wetlands and then laying these things out as a structure. You'd also have to have people supporting that as well. You've got all the other people that would be involved in that, maybe getting the food together and making stuff. You've got the people that are making the tools. This is a community event, and it's not the sort of thing that we've generally associated with the Mesolithic. It's usually something we've associated with the Neolithic. And I think part of that comes

back to our way we think about hunter-gatherers. There is this perception, and it dates back to our own colonial past, our encounters with hunter-gatherer groups and a european sort of view of hunter gatherers that saw them as relatively simple simple in terms of that they didn't have a particularly complicated social hierarchy or they weren't thought to possess a complicated social hierarchy they were seen as maybe not having much in the way of ideas of sort of ownership everything seemed to be communal there was this idea that hunter-gatherers just egalitarian and that they lived in quite small groups and this was despite the fact that europeans were encountering and seeing large monumental architecture made by hunter-gatherers in australia and different parts of continental north america

but they just conveniently ignored this or put it down to some sort of lost race of Europeans or something like that. There was just this idea that hunter-gatherers just weren't up to the job of that sort of communal activity. So when we thought about the European Mesolithic, those ideas have obviously filtered through. And so there's always been this idea that social complexity, communal monumental architecture is something that only comes in in the Neolithic with farming. But clearly, it's there right at the start of the Mesolithic at Starkar. And that's one of the great things about Starkar. It's not just a Mesolithic site that shows us this. It's the earliest Mesolithic site in the country that shows us this. People are right at the start of the Mesolithic have this, I don't want to use the term complex but they are clearly up to

the job of large communal structures coming together in large groups you know however you want to interpret what that means in terms of their society and then you think about why they're building structures as well these structures come in as the lake is starting to infill around the edges and so it's getting boggier whereas right at the beginning of the mesolithic you'd just be able to wade out through water. By this point, you're probably sort of squelching through a fair bit of this really organic-y sludge. It's harder to access areas of open water. And you can see these platforms as really as a way of investing in this place as well.

Because another preconception of hunter-gatherers is that they're highly mobile. They just move from place to place and and they are mobile but there's always been this idea that mesolithic people were quite fleeting yeah they had no permanent structures they just moved from place to place without really leaving much of a trace and what we see at Starrcar it's a massive investment in the ability to stay at that one place so they've already been there several centuries and then they just build these enormous wooden structures where a community comes together and basically says we want to stay here despite the fact the local environment is changing we will invest this communal effort

in order to allow that that is all just so amazing as you say it's so rare to have these significant structures surviving pre the Neolithic period, but you do have them there. But Nick, I've got to ask also about some of the artefacts, and we hinted at them earlier. This bone, this antler. Antler artefacts, first of all, there seems to have been an abundance of antler objects found from Starrcar. Yeah, there are. And it's worth saying that in the following

70 plus years since Starkar's been excavated there's been no other site in Britain excavated that's got such a large assemblage of animal bones and of bone and antler artifacts from this period so we've got other sites that are adding to that assemblage. But Starchar is by far and away the jewel in the crown in terms of numbers of these artifacts. And in some cases, it's the only place where we're finding some of these artifact types as well. So we've got two of the main bone and antler artifacts that really kind of typify Starchar. The barbed antler points, and then we've got the red deer frontlets, which Barry mentioned as well.

So we'll take the points first. So the barbed antler points, in order to make these, you're getting your whole red deer antlers. And we see at Star Car, we have a mixture of shed and unshed antlers. So some of them are still attached to parts of the skull. Some of them appear to have been dropped by the stag. So this is quite helpful because it tells us what time of

year people might be at that site, depending on whether the animal was holding its antlers when it was killed or whether the antler fell off. Although there's some arguments to suggest that maybe we're looking at people collecting antler throughout the year and then maybe doing this at particular times. So it gives us an idea when people are knocking around the environment. And then what you do is you take one of your flint tools and you carve two parallel lines down the length of the beam. So the main long bit of the antler, which all of the points, the tines come off. You carve these two lines down it and you keep on carving them and from experience both barry and i have done this experimentally to sort of reconstruct some of these you carve and you carve and you carve and it can take four or five hours to get two parallel

grooves that run all the way through the solid outer wall of the antler into the spongy central material in the antler and then you cut at each end so you try and do the same thing with two short parallel lines at each end of your splinter and then you wedge the tines into the grooves and lever your splinter out so then you have a lovely long relatively straight splinter of red deer antler and then these have been shaped so they're pointed at one end more kind of rounded at the other end and then there are a series of barbs or teeth carved into just one side so the technical description of these are uniserial barbed antler points because they only have barbs on one side hence the uniserial so just one side

and then at Star Car we have some that are quite short so maybe only 10 centimetres some which are very long I think the longest one is over 40 centimetres in length some of them have barbs very very close together some of them have barbs very well spaced so sometimes they're four or five centimeters apart and i think this suggests that maybe these are multi-purpose objects so they are potentially being used for fishing so we know in other sort of ethnographic accounts so of hunter-gatherer groups that are living in contemporary areas in the world you can see that maybe two or more of the barbed antler points are mounted at the end of a spear or a stick with the barbs facing towards each other and then you can stab it onto a fish or in particular an eel and the points go on either side of the eel and then

because of the teeth it kind of holds the eel in place and you can pull it out so they are what known as leisters so fishing leisters but these may also be being used for hunting big game so they may be being placed on either spears or arrows and used to hunt the large mammals that are living in the mesolithic they may also being used i think that they're probably going to be quite handy for hunting birds as well the idea that you could maybe fire them on the end of an arrow and the barbs will get caught in the wing structure. So it wouldn't maybe kill a bird, but it would definitely bring them down. So then you could go and retrieve them and kill them. So I think the variation in size and shape and different barbs, it might be something about different people

making them in different ways. So it might be an expression of identity, skill, but it might also be partly about the particular things that they're trying to do with them as well. Nick, before we go on a bit further on that, you mentioned something really interesting there, which is the hunting of birds. So do we have evidence that these early Mesolithic people were also using ranged weapons such as a bow and arrow too? Yeah, absolutely. So from across Northwest Europe, we've got quite a lot of good evidence for bow and arrow. And in some very lucky cases, we actually have preserved bows or fragments of bows. So there are bows from wetland sites in Scandinavia. There is a small bow recovered from Starkar as well. But there is difference in some of these.

So some of them look really quite big. So some of the bows from Scandinavia look like they have quite a substantial draw weight. And these would certainly give you enough power. So people have done experimental work on the power and the penetration of arrows from different types of bows. And some of the Mesolithic bows are definitely powerful enough to hunt big game. So to deliver a lethal blow to the largest of the mammal species that live in the Mesolithic. The one from Starkara is quite a lot smaller. And so it may be that we're looking at a lightweight bow that is used for things like maybe hunting birds you can imagine an arrow with a barb point on being used to bow hunt for fish maybe so standing on one of these

lovely wooden platforms that Barry described waiting for the fish to come in and then hunting them like that and we also have one of the stone tools that typifies the mesolithic known as a microlith so this is a small flint blade so a blade is anything that is parallel sided and is twice as long as it is wide or more and then the microlith you take your blade and then you snap it in one or more places and then you retouch it so you take tiny little removals off that snap to basically make small points and we've got evidence of lots of microliths found in the same place and again in scandinavia where the mesolithic is always even more dramatic than we get in britain we actually have some examples where you're seeing multiple microliths that are actually hafted into a wooden arrow shaft and they're held there with pine or some form of

tree resin and in that case we're seeing some have two so a microlith for the point and then a microlith at the side for a barb but in one case we actually have an arrow which has five microliths in one for the point and then two barbs on each side so the idea that we have this microlithic technology which is being used to make composite projectile points so you can use them and then if you miss or like if you lose a microlith you can just simply make another microlith and pop it back in and then you have a functioning arrow again so we've got quite a lot of evidence to say that they are using bows and arrows and then there's some evidence that they're using bigger things as well then there's some evidence that they're using bigger things as well so some of the points that we're getting particularly so again on the continent

some of the bone points that you get are simply too big too heavy to be functional on an arrow so that would suggest that they're being used on a spear and in some really rare cases we actually have some animal bones that exhibit the marks of weapons that have been used to kill them and there's a very famous example well there's actually a couple of examples in denmark two oryx so these big prehistoric cows and they've actually got big puncture holes in their scapula in their shoulder blade which suggests that they've been killed like a final coup de gras a final killing blow by some big spear or pole and in one case there's actually a hole in both scapula one side the spear is coming from the outside so from the external side of the body but in the other scapula the hole has been made from the inside. So basically that is a spear that has been run straight the way through the animal.

And you can imagine that's quite a dramatic final blow for maybe quite a dramatic hunt. So yeah, although we have these problems with the fact that the period is a long time ago, a lot of sites don't have organic preservation. So we only have partial remains here and there. We still have an amazing amount of information. When you look at it in really forensic detail, we have a lot of information that allows us to start seeing those parts of people's lives that are maybe missing at most sites. We can piece it together. Nick, I have to ask one more question on the bones and antlers before we move on to an overview, a bit of a wrap-up of other artefacts and then a wrap-up of Starcar. You kind of hinted at earlier these frontlets because these just look absolutely extraordinary. And what do we think their function was as well?

dollar question. This is exactly the kind of reason that I think we get into archaeology, because it's these enigmatic artefacts that really light a fire in people to think more about life in the past. So what these are, you need to imagine you've got a red deer skull, it's a male red deer, it's still got the antlers attached. So you've got the top of the skull, and then you've got the face and the nose projecting down in the front. We then see that they're intentionally trimming and removing parts of the skull so a lot of the brain case, the lower portion of the back of the skull that holds the brain and all of the front of the skull is taken off so we're left with just the forehead and then the very top of the skull where the antlers attach. So you can imagine this portion of the skull and then the antlers themselves go through a process of trimming so they are taking quite a lot of these antlers

so the crown so that's the big spiky bit right at the top the crown is taken off the beams are thinned down so some of them are half sectioned so they like making a barbed antler point carving those grooves in but instead of creating two grooves quite closely together to create a splinter they're doing on each side of the beam and actually removing one side of the beam so then you have a partial set of antlers which are maybe halved or hollowed out maybe with some of the biggest examples have got one or two tines sometimes they've just got small portions of antler left and these from experimental work that people have done this process takes an extensive amount of time to turn a skull into one of these frontlets then some of them have perforations so extra holes added Some of them are in the front of the frontlet,

some of them are in the side, some of them have absolutely no perforations at all. And I think this is quite an important thing, is to not think that they are all exactly the same. I think a total of 21 have been recovered from Starcar, and that's particularly important because to date, no others have been found at any Mesolithic site in Britain. And that's kind of why Star Carr becomes such an infamous site of this period. There are a few other sites in Europe that have artefacts that you might describe as frontlets as well. So modified skulls of red deer. But again, there is variation in what they look like. Some of them have trimmed antlers, some of them have

no antlers. So at Starkar, we've got a couple of examples where we've got that trimmed skull, but the antlers are either entirely gone, or in one case, it's a female and there were no antlers anyway. Some have full sets of antlers, some have perforations, some don't. So when Graham Clark found, I think 17 of them came out of Graham Clark's excavations, something around that number, including one with two intentional perforations in the front of the frontlet. So you imagine like basically on the top of the deer skull. And it's really enigmatic because it looks like a mask, you know, two big perforations sitting on the top of that frontlet. And you can almost imagine somebody wearing on their head, maybe even looking out through

those holes. Some of them have perforations on the side, which again may relate to it being tied to somebody's head. And they regularly get described as headdresses. And so obviously, as soon as you start describing something as a headdress, it kind of has an inherent interpretation that people are wearing them on their heads. So there's a chance that people are wearing them on their heads. And if they are, that might be one of a number of reasons. People have suggested that maybe they're being used as hunting disguises. So there is some evidence of hunter-gatherer groups in other parts of the world using costumes made out of the skin and the skulls of prey animals and you actually wrap yourself in

these and then go out hunting and the idea that it's camouflage to allow you to get closer to a prey that you want to hunt. Another suggestion is that these are actually artefacts that are related to the ontology, so the worldview of people, or some people describe it as the religious views of people in the Mesolithic. And in particular, people sometimes describe these headdresses as relating to shamanism. So shamanism is a particular religion that is recorded in particularly Siberian hunter-gatherer groups in the 18th and 19th century by anthropologists. And then as Western anthropology goes out and meets more hunter-gatherer groups in different parts of the world, more groups are classified as shamanistic in their religion or their worldview. The basic premise of shamanism

is the idea that these people live in a world that was full of different sentient, capable, intentional living things. In the way that we see humans as being sentient and intentional and full of emotion and the capability to act and react and think, groups that practice shamanism, and this is part of a broader set of practices that are known as animism, the idea that many things in the world are animate. So it's not just humans, actually lots of animal species, lots of plant species, weather, geological formations, lakes, all these kinds of things have the potential to be animate, so to be intentional, thinking, acting things. And this is a really core component of shamanism because that means that if you and that deer over there are inherently similar in your abilities and practices, some groups that

practice shamanism believe that because you're inherently similar, you can also either engage in negotiations with other species. So you can talk or you can negotiate your kind of standing with them, or in some cases you can even actually transform yourself from one species into another. And these transformations can be really dangerous, as you can imagine, like the fear of turning into a deer or a beaver or an otter and then getting stuck in that state can be like a real anxiety in shamanistic practices. So some of these groups have ritual specialists, and these are shamans. And these ritual specialists are the people that commune with non-human spirits, non-human beings in the landscape, and at times even go through these transformational processes. And Graham

Clarke, when he found these frontlets at Starcar, became really enamoured. There's a picture in his 1954 publication of Starcar of a shaman from a group called the Avenki in Siberia. And this shaman has got this big, elaborate dress, sort of garb on. He's holding a big drum and he's got a pair of frontlets on the top of his head and so graham clark in his interpretation says maybe it's a hunting disguise maybe it's something like this maybe it's something related to ritual or religious practice and so other people have kind of picked up on this and have suggested that these artifacts are about a negotiation between human relationships and their relationships with other species. So maybe some of them are being

worn, but maybe those perforations are also about mounting these. So maybe they're being hung in trees, mounted on posts around the site. The other thing that kind of makes me think that the headdress isn't a suitable interpretation for all of them is that not all of them have perforations. So I think some of them would be very difficult to wear. Some of them don't have antlers. The variety of practices that we see there, I think, points to a more subtle and more complicated practice. People at StarCart seem to be really interested in the heads of animals, particularly red deer, but not only red deer. They're also doing interesting depositional

practices with other species. And I think we are seeing practices where people are following particular rules of engagement with the remains of particular animal species, maybe even particular animal individuals. I think the really important thing with the red deer, if you go to a place where there are red deer populations, you talk to people that are familiar with them, like the rangers or people go there regularly, they recognise the stags based on their antler pattern, how many spikes they have, what particular shapes they are. So I think the antlers are a really powerful way for people to recognize particular individual animals so what we're seeing is that the heads of animals that are hunted that are encountered and engaged with during daily life people are then

taking them they're affording them a number of different treatments they are removing parts they are trimming parts they are perforating parts in some cases, and then they are going through a process of really intentional deposition. So these are being collated, they're being curated, and they're being put in the edge of the wetland. So I think some could be headdresses, some aren't, but I think the way that they're being treated shows that they are part of a broader practice by which people in the Mesolithic are engaged in really complicated and powerful and social relationships with the animals that they share the environment with and they ultimately hunt and then kill and

then have a duty to deal with their remains in a particular way. Well, there you go. Wow, Nick, round of applause for that. What an explanation indeed. Just literally taken away to shamans and headdresses. Were they headdresses? Were they not? That's absolutely brilliant. I'll come back to you, Barry.

We could talk about these artefacts from Starkar and from this area of Yorkshire for hours, no doubt. But to kind of wrap up talking about these artefacts, are there any particular artefacts that you'd like to highlight that you find particularly interesting that deserve a really good mention in the Ancients podcast? Oh, so what you're saying is what's my favourite artefact? Well, yeah. Okay, go on then.

There's the issue. I could start by the artefact that we still haven't found, and that's the boat. So we're looking at Starcar, we're looking at other sites around the lake. It's a large body of water. It's deep. It's six or seven meters deep in places. The easiest way to move around this landscape would be by boat. We don't have any.

Probably because they're made of either wooden frame with skins on or birch bark. So that'd be nice nice there's some sites in scandinavia so tiburn v for example in denmark it's got these dugout canoes dugout canoes are probably not an option around lake flixton and star car because of the the types of trees we've got but they also have these amazing decorated paddles and again if i'm going to talk about things i'd like to find around this landscape, yeah, these absolutely beautiful carved, they're made from the splitting, basically splitting a piece of wood, shaping it so it's really thin, creating beautiful shaped handles.

And then it goes to this massive heart-shaped blazer, decorated. I think that would be quite nice. One of the interesting things, I think, is that we've got all this organic preservation. We don't find much made of plant material, which is strange. Some of that, I think, is down to preservation bias. So the things that aren't made of wood, so things that might be made of reeds, for example, things might be made of nettle that's been turned into cord and turned into some sort of like textile or containers. We don't have those. And that could be preservation but there's not

a huge number of wooden artifacts we've got these platforms i think there was over 4 000 pieces of wood that were analyzed over a thousand of which showed some signs of modifications and then i think there's 30 artifacts and so it struck me that there's a paucity of wooden objects so we have projectile points we don't have arrows, for example. We have one bow, we have some digging sticks, but it's a very narrow range of artefacts and it's a very sort of limited number as well. So, you know, it makes you wonder what they're doing

that means that they don't preserve. So obviously they treat them differently to the objects made of animal remains. So we're missing some of that plant-based material culture. Yeah, I think my favourite artefacts would have to be the ones that aren't there. Boats and paddles, I think, would be fantastic to find. More plant-based material culture.

As Nick said, it's a ceramic. There's no pottery. They must have containers, presumably made of birch bark, possibly made of things like reed. We don't really have those. They would be just beautiful to find. And I think more decoration as well we know from northern europe that a lot of mesolithic material culture is decorated but less so around star car we've got some there are a few pieces at star car that are decorated

really nice decorated shale pendant some of the antler as well some of the antler barb points have got decorations on them but i think just generally more plant material more decorated stuff more art would be nice i think there you go art on a paddle that'd be perfect art on a paddle well there you go well we look forward to hearing when you make that startling discovery in the years ahead barry i guess i've got to ask another very very quick question to this so from the archaeology that you've got you've got the platforms you've got these artifacts you don't have much organic material apart from the woods but you've got all these bones and frontlets and so on do you think we could potentially say that this is at star card this is an early mesolithic village do we kind of know what the function of it might have

been uh it gets really really tricky to do that thing that archaeologists do of stroking their chin and say oh well you can't say that um i mean the sites occupy for eight centuries it's unlikely that the forms of activity stay the same it does seem to be particularly intensive in terms of occupation there are buildings above the shore on the dry ground so they only survive as as post holes so the holes where the posts of the building would have been. They're reasonably small, but there's a few of those, and I think there's probably a lot more on the site. So people probably live there. I think it's certainly tempting, given the scale of the site, the intensity of activity there.

It's certainly tempting to see it as a sort of focal point in the landscape. I wouldn't have any problem with calling it a settlement. Whether it's occupied all year round it's harder to tell but i think there's no reason to suggest that at least some people that are part of the community aren't there all year round maybe some people move to other places at different times i think the idea of how far away they move from the star car is also interesting to think about like the lake itself is a really really productive very rich economically rich landscape People probably don't have to travel very far to hunt. They're fishing, probably fouling, so hunting wild birds as well. Lots and lots of the plants in the area we know from other sites in Mesolithic Europe are used as plant

foods. So I don't have a problem with the fact that people are there, but it is essentially, yeah, a village would be one way of framing it, you know, a settlement occupied by a reasonably large number of people for the Mesolithic, I think. Well, it sounds very exciting for the years ahead as you guys uncover more and more and more. And, you know, if they're on the island, surely there must be boats. Surely there'll be a boat somewhere and you will find it, Barry.

Keep it there. It's going to happen one day. And I want to know when it happens, OK, because it's going to happen one day and I want to know when it happens okay because it's going to be big it's going to be massive but guys

this has been absolutely brilliant such an amazing insight into one of the greatest archaeological

gems in Britain and it just goes for me to say thank you so much to both of you for

taking the time to come on the podcast today thank you very much been great being here yeah thanks for having us.

Well, there you go. That was Dr. Nick Overton and Dr. Barry Taylor talking you through the amazing story of Starkar and other Mesolithic sites around the Vale of Pickering. They're some 11,000 years old and why these sites are a great jewel in the story of British archaeology, revealing more about Britain just after the end of the Ice Age. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. A couple of last things from me. We have a special bonus subscriber episode coming up in the next few weeks where I will answer your questions about the Roman Empire. Any questions you have you can send us the question via a link in the description. Just check the show notes that will tell you what you need to do. And alongside that make sure that wherever you're listening to

the ancients whether it be on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or elsewhere make sure that you are subscribed that you are following the ancients so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.