IN FOCUS

OPPOSITE The Mesolithic build under way outside the Yorkshire Museum, overlooked by the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey. LEFT Excavations at Star Carr, near Scarborough in North Yorkshire, have uncovered an illuminating array of organic remains representing a Mesolithic occupation site.

exploitation of specific resources, while the Star Carr artefacts reveal that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was not a hand-to-mouth struggle for subsistence, but one with sophisticated beliefs and enough leisure time to create objects beyond those needed for survival.

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of which can currently be seen in Star Carr: Life after the ice, an exhibition running at the Yorkshire Museum until spring 2026 (see p.60).

Rather more subtle, but no less significant, though, were a series of ghostly outlines formed from postand stake-holes: traces of structures that had once stood on the lakeside site. The first of these to be identified was dubbed ‘Britain’s oldest house’ (CA 248), as dating evidence put its construction in c.9000-8500 BC, displacing the previous title-holder, the ‘Howick house’ discovered in Northumberland and dated to 8000710 0 BC .

Other Mesolithic structures have been identified at wide-ranging locations including East Barnes near Dunbar in East Lothian, Mount Sandel near Coleraine in Northern Ireland (CA 59), Stainton West near Carlisle (as reported by Fraser Brown in New Light on the Neolithic of Northern England, edited by Gill Hey and Paul Frodsham), and Ronaldsway on the Isle of Man. These also post-date the Star Carr finds (see CA 331 for a more detailed discussion of some of them, and the same issue and CA 262 for wider explorations of life in Mesolithic Britain and Ireland), but they nevertheless add to a growing body of evidence that Mesolithic people, often viewed as nomadic communities who are archaeologically elusive compared to the ‘first farmers’ of the Neolithic period, did make some morelasting marks on their surroundings.

The ‘houses’ identified to-date may represent temporary settlements marking ‘special’ places returned to periodically, or used during seasonal

STRUCTURAL CLUES Almost two decades ago, co-director of the Howick excavations Clive Wadding t on bu i l t a r e c on s t r u c t i on of the Northumberland building (see CA 189 for photographs of this work), and now an experimental interpretation of Star Carr’s first str ucture has also been created, in a collaboration between York Museums Tr u s t and t he Unive r s i t y o f Yo rk , supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Its excavated remains were only slight, represented by a circular outline at least 3.5m in diameter, picked out by post-holes, and with a distinctive hollow in the centre. Using these clues, combined

RIGHT Some of the Star Carr antler headdresses. Such objects highlight the sophistication of Mesolithic communities, and they and many other artefacts from the site are currently on display in an exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum.

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