2 Mesolithic Settlements found in Britain

[Melvadius]

You go for millennia and little or nothing is discovered and then along come two sites at once. OK not strictly true but there have been two recent discoveries of actual structural remains from Mesolithic settlement sites (which can be added to the previously known Starr Carr and a very few other sites) towards rewriting the map of our knowledge of this remote period in British history.

 

The Mesolithic period is a period of mobile hunter/ gatherers recolonisation of Britain after the retreat of the ice fields when there seems to have been no permanent dwelling sites or at least none occupied on a permanent basis until very late on going into the Neolithic period when farming developed. Mesolithic sites are normally identified through a few specialist flint tools or more commonly large scatters of debitage from where the flint tools were created. These finds provide evidence of where people in the Mesolithic period have lived or at least passed through and at least in the case of Sefton may, if the report is correct, just about provide evidence of the first people to settle down on a more permanent basis.

 

First we have this report from the Guardian on the discovery of the remains of three possible hut structures at Lunt Meadow at Sefton on Merseyside dating back to around 5800 BC.

It will come as no surprise to proud Merseysiders, but a recent discovery of worked flints and charred timber suggests that when stone age people reached Lunt Meadows, a beautiful site at Sefton, they liked it so much that instead of continuing as nomadic hunter-gatherers, they settled down and built permanent dwellings.