#mesolithic

Calanais Stone Circle, Isle of Lewis, Scotland

This headdress was discovered at Star Carr, which is an archaeological site located in North Yorkshire. More than 30 other deer-skull headdresses (also known as frontlets) have been unearthed at the same site, all dating back to the Mesolithic period, c.9000-8000 BCE.

Above: one of the other headdresses from Star Carr

According to this article:

The most famous of the Star Carr finds are the enigmatic headdresses crafted from deer skulls, with holes drilled into them and parts of the antlers removed. Some headdresses are smaller than others, and could have been worn by children.

The headdresses are uncommon artefacts, with only three similar objects known elsewhere (in Germany), which raises the question of why there are so many at Star Carr.

Above: deer-skull headdress from Star Carr

The holes that were carved into each skull were likely used to secure the headdress onto the wearer's head.

Above: another frontler from Star Carr

The purpose and significance of these artifacts remains unclear. Some experts believe that they were worn as hunting disguises, while others argue that they served a ceremonial purpose. Those two theories may not be mutually exclusive, as this author points out:

The initial dichotomised interpretations offered by Dr. Graham Clark as to the frontlets’ purpose have characterised their discussion for the vast majority of the latter 20th century as either a shamanic headdress or a hunting disguise. More recently, however, researchers have critiqued this dichotomy, noting that many hunter-gatherer worldviews afford little meaningful distinction between functional and symbolic actions.

It can be argued that as shamans are widely regarded as playing a key role in negotiating human/animal relations and hunting luck, an artefact which aids the corporeal transformation of a human body into that of a deer could be used in both capacities interchangeably. Certainly, the contexts into which the frontlets were being deposited at Star Carr suggests that a complex set of meanings were attached to them.

Sources & More Info:

The British Museum: Headdress

Current Archaeology: A Survival Story: Prehistoric Life at Star Carr

Star Carr Volume Two: Studies in Technology, Subsistence and Environment: Antler Frontlets

Star Carr Archaeological Project: Antler Headdresses

York Archaeology: Mesolithic Marvels: Conserving the Star Carr Headdresses

PLoS One: Technological Analysis of the World’s Earliest Shamanic Costume

Prehistoric 'Swimming' Reindeer Mammoth Tusk Carving, 'Ice Age Art Now' Exhibition, Cliffe Castle, Keighley, Yorkshire

Posed with their chins up, antlers tipped back, and legs outstretched, the reindeer appear to be swimming as they do when crossing lakes and rivers on migration. This made the best use of the tapering tip of the mammoth tusk. The wavy lines on the male's face may represent water.

@togglesbloggle commented on a post of mine expressing interest in hearing about the transition between hunter-gatherers and farmers in prehistoric Britain. Hence, I read up on the Mesolithic, the period between the Ice Age and the arrival of farming in Europe, and produced this post.

Mesolithic Timeline

The Early Mesolithic begins around 9300 BC, at the end of the Ice Age in Britain, and ran until 7900 BC [1]. Humans had been extirpated from Britain during the Last Glacial Maximum (23,000 – 11,000 BC), at the end of the Ice Age, when expanding ice sheets reduced the country to a polar desert [2] and were re-introduced in the Early Mesolithic through settlers following the coasts (in northern England) and the River Thames and its tributaries (in southern England) and left behind little but stone tools, with the exception of a deer hunting camp at Star Carr in the northeastern English county of Yorkshire (you will be hearing a lot about Star Carr in this post – it’s the best-preserved and best-studied British Mesolithic site). Then came the Middle Mesolithic (8300-6800 BC), marked by settlement across all of Britain, burials in Wales and southwest England and the appearance of hearths, pits and hazelnut shells in the archaeological record. Then we get the Late Mesolithic (7100-4500 BC), marked by middens (a fancy term for waste heaps), reuse of older pits, internal trade in stone, cave burials in Wales and cremations in southern England. Finally we have the Terminal Mesolithic (4500-3500 BC) marked by international trade – such as Danish stone axes in Scotland and Irish ones in northwest England – before farming, permanent settlement, pottery, polished stone axes, leaf-shaped flint arrowheads and the other marks of the Neolithic period began [3].

The Mesolithic Environment

After the ice retreated, for a period Britain looked like Alaska does today [4], but birch and pine soon sprang up, and hazel, lime, oak and elm followed as the climate became warmer and wetter [5]. Known mammal species in this environment include hedgehogs, moles, various types of shrews and voles, hares, beavers, red squirrels, dormice, foxes, wolves, weasels, stoats, pine martens, otters, badgers, brown bears, wildcats, lynx, wild boar, red and roe deer, elks and aurochs [6]. Rising rainfall levels also meant that bogs appeared [7], and from the aforementioned Star Carr we have a record of bog flora and fauna – a landscape mostly of reeds peppered with other species like water lilies and bulrushes and birch, willow, aspen and polar for trees, inhabited by aquatic insects like pond skaters and water beetles [8]. The temperature rose as the era wore on, with the Early Mesolithic having an average winter temperature of -4°C (24.8°F) and an average summer temperature of 12.5°C (54.5°F) [9], while the later Mesolithic was on average 2°C warmer than Britain today [10].

Mesolithic People

Human remains from Mesolithic Britain are rare – there are only 28 sites from the period with human remains, and 22 of them have had the skeletons broken into pieces [11] – but from genetic analysis on one of the few complete skeletons we have, found in Cheddar Gorge in southwest England and thus named Cheddar Man, we know that they had dark brown skin, black hair and blue eyes [12]. None of their clothing has survived, but it seems likely that it was made of leather, since Star Carr may have been a leatherworking site – it has a disproportionate number of scrapers and awls and evidence of collection of moss and bracket fungus, which may have been used in tanning – and Dozmary Pool in southwest England has a similar collection of Mesolithic hide-working tools [13]. We do, however, have good evidence for jewellery, with bone, amber and shale beads (a few with lines carved into them) from various sites, a shale pendant with lines carved into it at Star Carr [14] and a cowrie shell with holes in it found in a midden near Oban on the west coast of Scotland [15]. Mesolithic populations were extremely low, with an average population density of 0.02 people per square kilometre [16] and, based on surviving hunter-gatherer societies, probably consisted of small, highly egalitarian groups where authority was based on knowledge and experience, war was rare and violence was mostly used against would-be tyrants [17]. The role of gender in the Mesolithic has not been thought about much, and most writing about it has assumed a men-as-hunters and women-as-gatherers model which may not have been the case [18].

Mesolithic Technology

The standard Mesolithic toolkit consisted of burins (stone tools used for working bone and antler), barbed points made from bone and antler, stone axes used for dealing with trees and, in particular, microliths [19], small triangular flint blades which are the most common Mesolithic artifact [20] which are most likely arrowheads. In addition to those, we have the aforementioned scrapers and awls, used for hide work [21], and harpoons found in various places – including Carriden on the east coast of Scotland [22] and in the River Thames [23]. In terms of the stone used, flint is the one that probably comes to mind, and was dominant in some areas such as northeast Scotland [24], but other important tool-making stones included quartz, chert [25], bloodstone from the island of Rhum and pitchstone from the Isle of Arran, both on the west coast of Scotland [26]. An important stone source was the Isle of Portland off the south coast of England, which furnished chert used all over southwest England and (since it's only found at the largest Mesolithic sites) probably exchanged at feasts and meetings of tribes [27]. One of the main parts of Star Carr’s notability is its large collection of wooden artifacts, including a platform made of birch branches built over the water, wooden rods that may have been meant for basketweaving, construction (such as wicker fences) or making charcoal, a canoe paddle and rolls of birch bark [28] probably meant for extracting resin [29] in order to attach microliths to arrow shafts [30].

Mesolithic Settlements

The most notable Mesolithic settlement is Mount Sandel in Ireland, a settlement in Northern Ireland excavated in the 1970s [31] consisting of a set of pit-houses formed by circular arrangements of postholes (as wooden posts rot, they discolour the soil they stood in – this is how archaeologists can detect them) around hearths, with radiocarbon dates from the hearths suggesting they remained in use over decades, [32] and with a probable population of 8-12 people [33]. Other known Mesolithic houses in Britain, such as at Howick in northeast England and Criet Dubh on the west coast of Scotland, follow the same pattern [34]. We also have a stone structure, in the form of a possible windbreak from Rushey Brow in northwest England [35].

Mesolithic Food

Isotope analysis (chemical analysis of the ratios of isotopes of different elements in bone, in particular carbon and nitrogen, to determine things about that person's diet) suggest that Mesolithic people had a level of meat in their diet similar to carnivores [36], with the most important animal being red deer [37], which people gathered together to hunt in winter and disbanded in summer when resources (particularly plants) were more plentiful and thus cooperation less necessary [38]. Mesolithic people had domesticated dogs, whose job was probably to aid with hunting [39]. The other major source of meat was fishing, and what was caught varied greatly from place to place; on the Isle of Portland it was mainly crabs [40], on Caldey Island off the south coast of Wales it was mainly seals [41], on the Scottish island of Oronsay it was overwhelmingly fish [42] and the aforementioned midden near Oban was mostly made of limpet shells [43]. By contrast, Irish Mesolithic people lived by hunting boar and catching freshwater fish, particularly eels and salmon [44].

For plant resources, hazelnuts are the most common, being found in virtually all Mesolithic sites [45]. Interestingly, hazel was probably deliberately cultivated by Mesolithic people by lighting forest fires - many extant hunter-gatherer cultures start fires in order to send signals, drive prey towards traps, create pathways and open spaces or (relevantly here) cultivate certain types of vegetation [46], hazel has a high resistance to fire and the appearance of hazel pollen in soil layers often correlates with charcoal [47] - in spite of this, there doesn't seem to have been any substantial anthropogenic deforestation in the Mesolithic [48]. Other notable plants include water lily tubers at Star Carr [49] and Mount Sandel, apple at Mount Sandel and near Oronsay [50] and berries - including blackberries, sloes [51], crowberries and hawthorn berries [52] - at many sites.

Mesolithic Religion

One of the main sources of information for Mesolithic religion is looking at religious beliefs and practices of extant hunter-gatherer societies and looking for common themes. And there's an extensive list of common themes - rites of passage, sacred places, spiritual importance of animals, a three-tiered world (land, sky and sea or heaven, earth and underworld), shamans interceding with spirits, clean and unclean spaces [53], supernatural beings creating distinctive landscape features and being active within it, meaningful names given to landscape features, hearths as the places for telling stories, fire as a means of summoning and communicating with spirits [54] and so on.

For actual Mesolithic evidence of religion, the most famous is a set of headdresses made from deer antlers found at Star Carr. The two common theories are that they were used as deer disguises to allow hunters to creep up on deer, or that they were used in ritual dances - both are anthropologically documented, the former in North America and the latter in Siberia, and since the latter is more similar to Early Mesolithic England, the latter explanation is more likely [55]. Antler masks and headdresses are found in many cultures, since deer are an important food source and deer antlers are visually striking while the top of deer skulls are easy to place on top of human heads [56]. Other potential ritual objects include stone tools and harpoons dumped in the water on the same site, a shale carving - of a phallus, hips, or both - from Nab Head in southwest Wales and harpoons, and human remains disarticulated and mixed into middens on Oronsay [57], and the engraved pendant from Star Carr mentioned at the top, which may have represented a sacred tree (although of course this is highly speculative). For sacred sites, water was a major theme, with depositions of objects inside water such as at Bath Hot Springs in southwest England, and platforms built on water such as the one at Star Carr and ones at Clowanstown and Lough Moynagh in southeast Ireland - while they may be for fishing, they're more likely to be ritual sites, since it's far easier to build a boat [58], which we know Mesolithic British people had thanks to the aforementioned paddle at Star Carr and a probable boat fragment at Bouldnor Cliff on the south coast of England [59].

Burials are some of our main evidence for religion in most prehistoric cultures, and that holds true here. While there's plenty of diversity - cremation, disarticulation, individual and collective burials, burials with and without grave goods and even the burial of a dog - the standard was bodies being broken up (whether by dismemberment or being fed to animals) and placed in middens [60], which may reflect "dividuality", an anthropological concept where societies see humans as being constituted by their relationships rather than having an inherent identity. Finally, on Loughan Island in the River Bann in Northern Ireland, we have a harpoon tip made of human bone, which was likely done to channel the power of the person who the bone came from [61].