being what it is, gathered plant foods alone wouldn’t even begin to supply the calories people require to stay alive for more than a short period.7 Having said that, the term ‘hunter-gatherer’ has been around so long that it has stuck. So I’ll continue to use it.
Grahame Clark’s excavations at Star Carr took place between 1949 and 1951, and revealed a remarkably well-preserved and partially waterlogged site, on the marshy fringes of a postglacial lake, which was occupied around 7500 BC.8 Since Clark’s excavations, the animal bones from the original dig, plus the area around Star Carr, have been closely examined by archaeologists and archaeological environmentalists, so that it now possible to put the site into a reasonably coherent regional context.9 This, of course, is necessary if we are to work out how hunters operated. It’s no good looking at just one spot in the landscape, because the prey, and with it the hunters, are obliged to move around.
Star Carr produced a wealth of information about hunting. It was also a site where antler – of both native species of British deer, red and roe – was worked to make a variety of barbed spearheads, the vast majority of which were not fitted with small flint barbs. Antler is tough stuff, and requires special tools and techniques to be worked efficiently. Many of the flint tools, borers and burins, were designed to score and bore through the antler in a technique known as groove-and-splinter, which produced long, thin and strong ‘blanks’; these could then be further modified to produce the finished spearhead. Most of the raw material for this mini-industry was brought to the site as antlers, rather than as deer on the hoof. So it is best to omit antlers when using bones from an excavation to estimate the range and number of animals that were hunted.
Tony Legge and Pete Rowley-Conwy have analysed the bones from Star Carr and have shown that over half, by weight, of meat came from wild cattle, followed by elk and red deer, with roe deer and wild pig bringing up the rear. It is suggested that the larger animals were hunted by stealth, rather than by large groups of hunters working a ‘drive/stampede’ system, which we saw at Stellmoor in Germany in the Final Upper Palaeolithic. Evidence to support the idea of stalking is provided by the remarkable discovery on the shoulderbones of two elk and one red deer of lesions produced by a flint-tipped spear or arrowhead. What makes them remarkable is that they had healed over. In other words, the three animals in question had each survived at least one attempt to hunt them before they were finally caught and killed.
The position of the wounds, at the shoulders, suggests that the hunters were aiming for the heart. If they missed, as often would have happened, they would have had to resign themselves to a long period of stalking, as the prey slowly bled to death.10 And of course sometimes the animals got away – maybe when night fell and the trail went cold. The fact that these three beasts had done so suggests that the animal population around Star Carr and the now-vanished Lake Flixton was more sedentary than usual. Alternatively, it might suggest a somewhat larger human population in the region, perhaps at certain times of the year. But whatever the explanation, it is not the sort of thing one would have expected to encounter much earlier, at places like Paviland or Boxgrove. It’s a sign, surely, that the general population was growing.
Smaller animals, including pine marten, red fox and beaver, were also taken, probably for their pelts. The hunters at Star Carr were most remarkable for having domestic dogs, which presumably were used for hunting and rounding up.11 I find it fascinating to think that my own Border collie sheepdog, Jess, when she rounds up ewes is behaving in a fashion that any Mesolithic hunter would immediately recognise.
I’ve mentioned that the site was positioned next to a lake, so how can we explain the lack of fishbones? The best theory to account for the absence of fish, particularly pike, a large freshwater fish that one might have expected to be found near Star Carr, is that they hadn’t recolonised this part of Britain after the very cold years of the last glaciation.12 The North Sea would still have been very cold, and it is doubtful whether the small prey fish that pike need to feed on would have been present in anything like adequate numbers. So in this instance the absence of fishbones may indicate an absence of fish. Unfortunately, however, the acidity of the peats at Star Carr is sufficient to degrade fishbone, so the question cannot be satisfactorily resolved one way or the other.
Star Carr was waterlogged, and produced large quantities of wood, but evidence for actual wood-working took some time to appear. And when it did appear it lingered on our kitchen draining-board for ages. I should perhaps point out that my wife, Maisie Taylor, is a specialist in prehistoric wood-working, and I have had to grow used to finding black, grimy and rather unpalatable pieces of ancient wood in the sink. It’s a part of our life.
The pieces in question were sent to Maisie by Professor Paul Mellars at Cambridge, who was writing up excavations he had carried out at Star Carr with Tim Schadla-Hall in 1985 and 1989. They had come across some pieces of wood they thought had been worked by man. The wood in question seemed to have come from an artificial platform of some sort, but they couldn’t be entirely certain, unless it could be shown to have been worked or split by man. Other wood-working specialists had expressed reservations about its possible man-made status.
Maisie looked at it very closely, and at first she too had her doubts; but there were areas where peat still adhered to the surface, and if gently floated off (in our sink) its removal might reveal fresh surfaces, which could be diagnostic. The freshly removed peat did indeed expose cleanly split surfaces, and I spent several happy hours in our barn taking close-up photographs which showed clearly that the wood – or rather timber, to give it its correct name* – had been worked by humans.13 This is the earliest evidence for worked timber found anywhere in the world – and it spent a tiny part of its long life in my sink. When he saw Maisie’s first results, Paul immediately recalled a series of bevelled red-deer antler tines, illustrated in the original Clark report, which he thought might well have been used as wedges for splitting.
In our story so far we have failed, if that’s the right word, to discover a site that we could safely say was a home-base: in other words, somewhere where people stayed and lived. Even at Boxgrove we saw how the meat was probably taken away from the smelly, fly-blown butchery site at the bottom of the cliff and up towards the woods on the chalk hill above. None of the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic caves we have looked at could with any certainty be considered a permanent dwelling-place, and Earls Barton wasn’t really a site at all.14 What about Star Carr, which has produced a huge amount of material, including a great variety of things such as antler mattocks and bone scrapers? Surely this represents a home-base, as the excavator, Grahame Clark, himself believed? I would love to think so, but unfortunately that re-examination of the animal bone refuse by Tony Legge and Pete Rowley-Conwy showed that most of the bone found on site comprised those bits that don’t actually have much meat on them: lower jaws, shoulderblades and foot bones. The joints, the rich cuts as it were, had been taken away and eaten elsewhere – and wherever it was, that’s where home was for those lakeside hunters. Despite its archaeological richness, Star Carr was still essentially a hunting camp, albeit a well-frequented one, and one, moreover, probably quite close to a main home-base.
Work carried out in the Vale of Pickering after the original excavations of Grahame Clark gives a clear impression that there were a number of settlements around the now vanished postglacial Lake Flixton. Some were hunting camps, others more resembled home-bases. But there does seem to be one important respect in which Star Carr differs from those hugely mobile communities in the Late Upper Palaeolithic: it would seem that life near Lake Flixton did not involve much long-distance travel. The area was richly stocked with large mammals,
