Stonehenge archaeologists discover second 'wooden henge'

By Paul Armstrong, CNN

London, England (CNN) -- Archaeologists studying the iconic Stonehenge monument in southern England have uncovered a second prehistoric henge-like circle only 900 meters away, which they hope will shed more light on the mysterious stone landmark.

The remains, comprising a circular ditch surrounding a ring of 24 internal pits up to one meter in diameter and designed to allow posts to support a free-standing, timber structure up to three meters high -- are thought to date from the late Neolithic period, some 4,500 years ago.

"Although it would have been made out of timber rather than stone, it's comparable in scale to the existing Stonehenge monument," said Henry Chapman of the University of Birmingham in central England.
Chapman was one of the British-led team involved in a multi-million dollar project to "map" the World Heritage site, using state-of-the-art imaging technology to recreate "virtually" the iconic monument and its surroundings.

The images, which resemble a lunar landscape, provide an outline of the circle buried under the surface with its opposing north-east and south-west entrances, together with what archaeologists believe to be a burial mound in the center.

This discovery is completely new and extremely important in how we understand Stonehenge and its landscape.
--Professor Vince Gaffney

"Rather than giving us a map or plan of what is buried, this technology allows us to see it in three dimensions," Chapman told CNN. "We can almost excavate the site virtually by peeling off five centimeters at a time to see what is there."

Project leader, Professor Vince Gaffney of the University of Birmingham, hailed the find as one of the most significant yet for those researching Britain's most important prehistoric structure.

"This finding is remarkable," he said in a statement on the university's website. "It will completely change the way we think about the landscape around Stonehenge.

"People have tended to think that as Stonehenge reached its peak it was the paramount monument, existing in splendid isolation. This discovery is completely new and extremely important in how we understand Stonehenge and its landscape."

Chapman added that the find may be the start of an exciting new chapter at Stonehenge. "We're just in the first year of a four-year project, so we'd expect to find lots more between the known monuments we see at present and hopefully fill the gaps in our knowledge," he said.

Debate has raged about the origins and purpose of Stonehenge, located on Salisbury Plain approximately 90 miles west of London.

Known for its orientation in relation to the rising and setting sun, the circle of stones represented a prehistoric temple to some. Others argued it was an astronomical observatory. Or that it was a marker of time.

But last year, archaeologists unearthed a new stone circle a mile from Stonehenge that they said lent credence to the theory that the famous monument was part of a funeral complex.

Dubbed "Bluestonehenge" after the color of the 25 Welsh stones of which it was once composed, the new find sat along the banks of the nearby River Avon.

University of Bristol archaeologist Joshua Pollard suggested Neolithic peoples would have come down river by boat and literally stepped off into Bluestonehenge. They may have congregated at certain times of the year, including the winter solstice, and carried remains of the dead from Bluestonehenge down an almost two-mile funeral processional route to a cemetery at Stonehenge to bury them.

The latest project, which is supported by the site's landowner, the National Trust, and facilitated by English Heritage, brought together the most sophisticated geophysics team ever to be engaged in a single archaeological project in Britain, involving archaeologists and other specialists from the UK, Austria, Germany, Norway and Sweden.

Excavation of Star Carr (1949–1953)

Between 1949 and 1953, Grahame Clark directed the excavation of Star Carr, a lakeside, early Mesolithic site in northeastern Yorkshire, near the town of Scarborough. The waterlogged nature of the site meant that the preservation of the organic artifacts and remains was excellent. Pollen analysis and the remains of trees at the site were evidence of a lakeside, forested landscape, around two hundred years after the ice cap had retreated.

As the expert on the European Mesolithic, Clark was the ideal director of the excavation. Clark had based his revolutionary books on the Mesolithic period, written in the 1930s, on data produced by other people. Here was his opportunity to excavate and interpret new data and to compare it with previous data sets. Star Carr was an exemplary site.

The assemblage recovered from the site comprised simple microlithic (small) stone tools in the shape of barbs and arrows; flint scraps and burins used for working on antlers and bones; awls and axes; barbed spearheads made from red deer antler; elk antler mattocks for digging; scrapers made from wild ox bone; and a number of what appear to be masks made from red deer antlers, which may have been used as hunting camouflage or for ceremonial purposes. The remains of a wooden paddle were also found. Analysis of the animal remains revealed the subsistence patterns of the occupants and the nature of the social groups who used it. The animals they hunted included red deer, elk, roe deer, wild oxen, elk, wild pigs, and water fowl. There were no fish remains—perhaps they were not available in the lake this early, but the remains of two domestic dogs were found, among the earliest remains of this kind in Europe.

Based on the amount of animal bone found it was estimated that the site supported a group of around twenty-five people annually over a six-year period. However, if the occupation had been more intermittent, then the period of occupation was probably longer. The bone and antler technology, such as sickles and barbed points and arrows, was as distinctively Mesolithic as the lithic artifacts. Clark concluded that Star Carr was a specialized seasonal hunting and butchering site rather than a long-term occupation site, probably used by groups who moved on, depending on the season, to other camps on the coast or up onto the moors in the hills.

Excavations at Star Carr was published in 1954, and it reflected the careful analysis and resulting scope of interpretation by Clark and his colleagues. There were chapters on lake stratigraphy and pollen, animal bones, and the flint, bone, and antler tools.

Since 1954 other interpretations (and further excavations) have been made at Star Carr. It is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the significance of the site, and the issues initially addressed by Clark, that it has continued to attract such attention and disagreement.

Further Reading Clark, J. G. D. 1932. The Mesolithic Age in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, J. G. D. 1952. Prehistoric Europe: the economic basis. London: Methuen. Clark, J. G. D. 1954. Excavations at Star Carr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fagan, B. 2001. Grahame Clark: An intellectual biography of an archaeologist. Boulder, CO: Westview. Legge, A., and P. Rowley-Conwy. 1988. Star Carr revisited. London: Birkbeck College. Mellars, P., and P. Dark. 1998. Star Carr in context. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Excavation of Jarmo (1948–1954)

Jarmo is an archeological site located in northern Iraq on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.

From the beginning of his career Robert Braidwood (1907–2003) was interested in the theories of Gordon Childe and others about the origins of civilizations. After World War II he began to search for a Near Eastern site that would provide evidence of the “Neolithic revolution.” Following the theories of Childe, this was widely believed to have been the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding communities. As such this transition would represent the first rung on the ladder to the later development of early urban or city-state–based civilization, one likely triggered by environmental and population pressures.

Jarmo was a small village site in northwestern Iraqi Kurdistan, on the “hilly flanks” of the Zagros Mountains. Braidwood deliberately chose a site in a topographic zone where wild resources overlapped with domesticated ones, and where farming without irrigation would have been possible. The data from such a site would be different from what would have been obtained at sites in the “the fertile crescent” closer to the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Braidwood and his team discovered that this small village had been occupied by a community between 100 and 150 people for several centuries during the seventh millennium BC. The deployment of a multidisciplinary team comprised of paleobotanists, zoologists and geologists, radiocarbon and ceramic experts, anthropologists, and archaeologists made it possible to recover and analyze plant and animal evidence at the site, along with the more traditional architectural and artifactual evidence.

The people of Jarmo had lived in rectilinear household complexes made from mud bricks. Their economy was based on growing and harvesting domestic emmer and eikorn wheat, barley, and lentils. They also harvested wild plants, such as field peas, pistachio nuts, acorns, and wild wheat and barley, and kept dogs, domestic goats, sheep, and later, pigs. However, they also hunted wild animals, such as cattle, onager, and other small mammals. The bones of lions, leopards, small wildcats, foxes, and lynxes were also found at the site, killed either for their pelts or to protect the occupants and their flocks.

The inhabitants of Jarmo made a variety of flint and obsidian tools ranging from large to very small sizes. Many milling and grinding stones were found as well as small celts and chisel-like implements and some stone beads, pendants, and bracelets. A small amount of obsidian was imported from Anatolia, and then worked at the site. Other imports included turquoise and marine shells. Stone bowls were made from local limestone, and a small amount of pottery was produced (an innovation that seems to have originated elsewhere) there. Many small clay figurines (human, animal, and geometric) were found, along with many bone tools (such as awls or perforators), bone spoons, and beads.

Our understanding of and interest in the transformation from huntergathering to food production has changed since the 1950s, when research focused on the environmental and population pressures that contributed to its occurrence. Prehistorians now focus on understanding the social reasons for the transformation, and the social and cultural consequences of such a major change in lifestyle. However, the importance of Braidwood’s work at Jarmo has not changed. It provided the empirical evidence that such great cultural and economic changes had occurred, evidence as to how these early communities had changed from wild to domesticated resources, and evidence that this evolution had taken place over a longer period than had been thought. For many years Jarmo was the oldest agricultural and pastoral community in the world. The interdisciplinary fieldwork Braidwood pioneered became the model for fieldwork investigations of important regional cultural and economic transitions, not only in western Asia, but also all over the world. The archaeological techniques and methodology Braidwood pioneered at Jarmo became central to mainstream archaeological research design.

Further Reading Braidwood, R. J., and L. S. Braidwood. 1950. Jarmo: a village of early farmers in Iraq. Antiquity 24: 189–195. Braidwood, R. J., and G. R. Willey, eds. 1962. Courses towards urban life. Chicago: Aldine. Watson, P. J. 1999. Robert John Braidwood, 1907-. In Encyclopedia of archaeology: The great archaeologists, ed. T. Murray, 495–506. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Willey, G. R., ed. 1982. Archaeological researches in retrospect. Washington, DC: University Press of America.

Lascaux Discovered (1940)

Painting of stag and reindeer at Lascaux Cave.

In 1940 the cave of Lascaux in the Dordogne region of France was found by four schoolboys—it had the most spectacular collection of Paleolithic wall art yet seen. French archaeologist Henri Breuil was the first specialist to visit the cave and to verify its Paleolithic provenance. In 1902 Breuil and colleague Carthailac rediscovered and explored the cave of Altamira in Spain— and had put to rest all skepticism about the site and the authenticity of prehistoric cave art by announcing that the art on the walls of Altamira was Paleolithic and not fake. Since then the two had explored the cave of Naiux in France, and Breuil had become the world’s expert on cave art.

Lascaux has never been completely excavated, so detailed information about chronology and occupation is lacking. Nonetheless it is believed to be a site that people visited occasionally and specially for ritual purposes. It is believed the art was not all created at the same time and was the result of a number of different episodes of decoration. Charcoal fragments have been dated to around 17,000 years ago. It is best known for its magnificent paintings— some 600, and for its engravings—some 1,500. These are all the more remarkable in that they appear in different sections of the cave.

The first space in the cave is the great “hall of bulls,” about 20 by 5 meters, where the walls are covered in painted figures—the main group 5 meters long and dominated by four enormous black auroch bulls, along with smaller horses and deer and what appears to be an animal with two straight horns known as a unicorn. This space joins a gallery 20 by 1.5 meters by 3.5 meters wide that is decorated with paintings of cattle, deer, and horses. An adjoining shaft is decorated with the only human figure—a bird-headed man spearing a bison. A third space, 5 meters by 5 meters, is decorated with black deer heads and male bison. Another narrow shaft is decorated with engravings of felines. The Paleolithic entrance to the cave has never been found.

Ladders and scaffolds must have been used by the artists to get close to the higher surfaces, and there are pieces of wood in the caves that are probably the remains of these. In the highest space sockets are cut into the rock faces, some 20 meters above the floor. These were packed with clay and evidence of branches used to span the space has been pressed into the filler. At Lascaux there is abundant evidence of the techniques used to create Paleolithic cave art—stone tools for engraving, lamps, mineral fragments, basic mortars and pestles stained with pigments, and hollowed stones containing pigment powders. Sources for the ochre used in the cave have been identified.

Lascaux was opened for public visitation in 1948, but unfortunately because of modern algae and pollens and the heating of the atmosphere due to the large number of visitors, the surfaces of the cave complex began to deteriorate. In 1963 it was closed, but in 1983 a facsimile Lascaux was opened nearby.

Further Reading Bahn, P. 1998. The Cambridge illustrated history of prehistoric art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bahn, P., and J. Vertut. 1988. Images of the Ice Age. New York: Facts on File. Boule, M. 1921. Les hommes fossiles, eléments de paléontologie humaine. Paris: Masson. Boule, M. 1923. Fossil men. English translation. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. Chippindale, C., and P. Tacon, eds. 1998. The archaeology of rock-art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramos, P. A. Saura. 1999. Cave of Altamira. New York: Abrams. Ruspoli, M. 1987. Cave of Lascaux. London: Thames and Hudson.

Excavation of Maiden Castle (1934–1937)

An archaeologist cleans a skeleton with a brush. Dr. Wheeler supervised the excavations at Maiden Castle, near Dorchester which have brought to light a number of skeletons. The excavations reveal the scene of a battle of AD 40. Photographed August 31, 1937.

Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler (1890–1976) was educated in the classics at University College London and in fine arts at the Slade Art School. He was one of the few young archaeologists to survive World War I. In 1920, after becoming keeper of archaeology at the newly founded National Museum of Wales, Wheeler began to excavate the Roman forts of Segontium (1921–1922), Brecon Gaer (1924–1925), and Caerleon (1926).

At these sites Wheeler began to develop and test the excavation techniques for which he later became famous. The last great advances in this area were made by General Augustus Pitt-Rivers in the 1880s, and Wheeler built on these, clarifying site stratigraphy by keeping simple, graphic, and sectional records of surfaces and sections. In 1926 Wheeler declined the Abercrombie Chair of Archaeology in Edinburgh and moved to work at the London Museum, where he wrote a series of classic and popular catalogs based on his research on Roman, Viking, and Saxon London. He continued to be fascinated by the relationship between Iron Age and Roman society in Britain, excavating at the Sanctuary of Nodens at Lydney in Gloucestershire (1928–1929), and at the late Iron Age and Roman city of Verulamium, near the town of St. Albans in southern England (1930–1933). At all of them Wheeler continued to develop his expertise in stratigraphic excavation and dating.

Between 1934 and 1937 Wheeler excavated the massive Iron Age hill-fort of Maiden Castle in Dorset in southern England. Many Iron Age hill-forts had been identified and excavated prior to this, but work had been hampered by the fact that they had either been excavated on too small a scale or without knowledge of pottery typology. The Maiden Castle Report, published in 1943, was a triumph, a book written in a highly direct and engaging style but full of important information.

Since his first excavations in Wales in 1921 until the last year at Maiden Castle in 1937, Wheeler had been refining his approach to excavation focusing on those elements such as excavation strategy and techniques, recording, and personnel management, which were also Pitt-Rivers’s concerns. The fact that both men had distinguished military careers has not gone unnoticed. At Maiden Castle Wheeler excavated in a checkerboard of grid squares that achieved two significant goals. First it allowed him to open up large areas without losing stratigraphic control. Second, the squares could be effectively linked up to create a sense of near-continuous stratigraphy across a large site. The approach, called the “Wheeler method,” set the benchmark in field excavation for the next forty years, achieving a goal that Pitt-Rivers never attained—to radically influence the process of field archaeology and through it to focus on the link between method and the reliability of interpretation. He was to use it to great effect in India during the 1940s and 1950s during excavation of Indus civilization sites.

Further Reading Cunliffe, B. 1999. Sir Mortimer Wheeler, 1890–1976. In Encyclopedia of archaeology: History and discoveries, ed. T. Murray, 371–384. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Hawkes, J. 1982. Mortimer Wheeler: Adventurer in archaeology. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Sharples, N. M. 1991. English Heritage book of Maiden Castle. London: Batsford/English Heritage. Wheeler, R. E. M. 1943. Maiden Castle, Dorset. Oxford: printed at the University Press by J. Johnson for the Society of Antiquaries.

Godwin and the Fenland Research Committee (1932--1948)

The first successful use of pollen analysis to explore vegetation history was by the geologist Lennart von Post, in Sweden in the 1920s. By identifying the relative abundance of pollen grains of different trees and plants in different strata, the ecology of an area during prehistoric times, that is, its climate, forest composition, and agricultural practices, and any changes to these over time, could be elucidated. This new scientific technique spread rapidly throughout Europe, so that by 1927 more than 150 papers about its use and the mapping of prehistoric ecologies had been published. In 1923 Harry Godwin began to employ pollen analysis for archaeological ends in England. Godwin (1901--1985) studied botany and geology at Cambridge University where he worked for the whole of his career.

During the 1920s and 1930s researchers began working together using pollen analysis to discover and map the impact of climate and human activity on the history of woodland (tree and shrub) vegetation. Refinements in technique led to the identification of many different kinds of pollen, such as the pollen of herbs and weeds and cereals, many of which were important indicators of past human activity. These refinements permitted the interpretation of certain features seen in pollen diagrams from natural deposits as the faint traces of the activities of the first farmers of the Neolithic period. One such feature is elm decline, which appeared in pollen diagrams as a noticeable and widespread reduction in elm pollen at a particular point, and was used to divide the Atlantic pollen zone from the succeeding sub-boreal one. Was this elm decline the result of human activity or climatic change or both? Many pollen diagrams revealed changes just above or after the decline horizon, which probably represented prehistoric episodes of woodland clearance, farming, and abandonment.

As pollen analysis developed across Europe, and its results were compared and tabulated, so could diagrams of different pollen compositions be mapped and divided into zones representing different phases of time, thus providing a means of dating suitable sediments. Precise correlations could be made within climatic, geographic, faunal, botanical, and archaeological pollen and sediment sequences. This chronology was used for the next twenty years until the advent of radiocarbon dating in 1950. In September 1931, a fishing trawler dredged up a harpoon from the Lenan and Ower Bank in the North Sea. Godwin analyzed a sample taken from the North Sea bed and found it was boreal in age (that is, from before the sea-level changes after the last Ice Age). The harpoon was examined by members of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia in 1932 and identified as an example of a finely barbed antler point, similar to those found at many Mesolithic Magelmosian sites across northern Europe and as far east as Estonia. What was even more interesting was that the sediment surrounding the harpoon was from fresh water. So this harpoon from under the sea was originally from a freshwater site, on hilly land that had been covered by the melting ice sheets at the end of the last Ice Age, when the Baltic and North seas had joined. What this proved was that the prehistory of Britain, prior to the end of the last Ice Age, was similar to that of northern Germany and Scandinavia, whereas its postglacial prehistory was unique. To further elucidate these thousand or so years of ecological changes and their impact on human populations and settlements, British archaeologists, following the example of their Scandinavian colleagues, began to work closely with paleobotanists, geologists, geographers, and biologists.

Godwin began to study the fens (or swamps) of East Anglia and Cambridgeshire with archaeologist Grahame Clark. The Fenland Basin of East Anglia was an ideal place to begin to study and map the history of British vegetation since the last Ice Age and to correlate this with geographic and demographic settlement changes at the same time. The area had been flooded by the North Sea and then covered by postglacial waterlogged deposits. During the sixteenth century AD the fens had been drained for agriculture, and by the twentieth century their upper peat beds had worn away in some places, so that banks of marine silt could be found. Air photographs (with O. G. S. Crawford) and ground surveys mapped the original fen waterways and the flat and built-up areas used for agriculture and settlements. In 1932, inspired by Godwin's expertise in pollen sampling and paleobotany and Clark's interest in using both for archaeological ends, the Fenland Research Committee (FRC) was established to conduct foundational research into the reconstruction of ancient British landscapes and environments. The FRC has been described as 'the first truly modern prehistoric project, because of its interdisciplinary scope.' At its peak, as Pamela Smith noted, it comprised forty-two specialists, including faunal, mollusk, and charcoal experts.

Godwin established the relationship between pollen zones and the stratigraphy of the peat by identifying the relative abundance of the pollen grains of different trees and plants in different strata. These analyses delineated the ecology of the area during prehistoric times, specifically its climate, forest composition, and agricultural practices. Godwin's pollen analyses of the peat deposits of these swamplands (or fens) elucidated the history of changes to their vegetation, and from these data Clark could interpret their impact on human occupants and geographic development. The FRC worked throughout the 1930s until 1948, when it became part of the subdepartment of Quaternary Studies at Cambridge University.

Clark and members of the FRC excavated and analyzed material from a number of different types of sites. At the site at Peacock\u2019s Farm Clark excavated flints from a Bronze Age level, and underneath that pottery from a Neolithic level, and below that a typical Tardenoisian core with other stone tool flakes and pieces from the Mesolithic period were found, the first time such a culture sequence had been demonstrated on a British site. The final report set the cultural remains in an environmental context. Other sites, such as Mildenhall Fen and a Bronze Age foundry, were explored for different reasons but in every case there was a conscious attempt to integrate archaeological and ecological information.

Other archaeologists at Cambridge, such as O. G. S. Crawford, Christopher Hawkes, and Stuart Piggott, all participated in the FRC's working committee. During the 1930s many undergraduates and postgraduates, such as Glyn Daniel, Thurstan Shaw, Charles McBurney, and J. Desmond Clark, had their first experience of fieldwork on FRC surveys and excavations. The FRC published five reports on archaeological excavations and thirteen studies of postglacial history by Godwin, in preparation for his classic History of British Flora.

Godwin became a global leader in ecological thought and practice. His work in the fenlands with Clark and other scientists, along with their data and interpretation, was finally published in 1950 in The History of British Flora. In 1948 he became the founding director of the subdepartment of Quaternary Studies. In this position and later, as professor of botany, he contributed to the uses of radiocarbon dating, to the geological history of changes in land sea levels, and to the archaeological implications of this work. Palynology and paleobotany have long since become essential to the reconstruction of past climates and ecologies and central to the business of archaeology. Godwin was knighted in 1970. Clark was to become Disney Professor of Archaeology in Cambridge and was knighted as well.

Further Reading Clark, J. G. D. 1989. Prehistory at Cambridge and beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fagan, B. 2001. Grahame Clark. An intellectual biography of an archaeologist. Boulder, CO: Westview. Smith, P. 1997. Grahame Clark's new archaeology: the Fenland Research Committee and Cambridge prehistory in the 1930s. Antiquity 71: 11--30.

Publication of The Mesolithic Age in Britain (1932) and The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe (1936)

 

The picture, reconstructs a site near Broadway where young archaeologists found flint microliths (used about 8,000 years ago).www.wyac.co.uk/broadway_homepage.htm. It shows a mesolithic hunting group, who lived in the period just after the last Ice Age.

The last prehistoric period to be named and understood in any detail was that between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods. In the early twentieth century it was designated the Mesolithic, literally 'the middle Stone Age.' Some of the reasons for this late identification and designation lie in the fact that its study fell between disciplines as well. At that time the Paleolithic period, from 30,000--10,000 BC, characterized by big-game hunters with large tools and cave paintings, was the province of geologists. The Neolithic period, from about 5000--2000 BC was the province of archaeologists. The 3,000 years of the Mesolithic were therefore a puzzle.



This time, ca. 9000--6000 BC, was thought to be a period of cultural regression because people had used simpler and smaller stone tools, or microliths, as distinct from the larger stone tools used during both the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods. So what was the Mesolithic? No great leaps forward in human culture seemed to be evident, and it was so insignificant that there was a debate about whether it was a period in its own right, or whether it should be called the epi-Paleolithic or the proto-Neolithic. During the late nineteenth century the great French archaeologist Gabriel de Mortillet claimed that Europe was unoccupied during the period between the cave painters and the crop planters--or him there was no Mesolithic. In the 1920s Gordon Childe dismissed it as making a negligible contribution to European culture.



In 1932, less than ten years after Childe's dismissive comments, English archaeologist Grahame Clark revolutionized our understanding of this period. The Mesolithic, Clark argued, was a time of major transformation in European prehistory. At its beginning humans were living as they had for the last 30,000 years, and at its conclusion they had adopted agricultural economies, had ranked societies, and had altered the natural environment to suit themselves. Clark believed the microliths they used were the basis of a versatile tool kit--a set of tools that could be adapted in a number of ways on a variety of resources--or arrows, spears, fish barbs, or as sickles for hunting and gathering. Instead of being evidence of forgetting how to make big tools, they were proof that big tools were no longer needed. Life in the Mesolithic required a whole range of smaller and composite tools, because people had diversified their food resources.



In his two books, The Mesolithic Age in Britain (1932) and The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe: A Study of the Food-Gathering Peoples of Northern Europe during the Early Post-glacial Period (1936), Clark proved that the great changes in climate that had occurred during the Mesolithic period had an enormous impact on the environment in northern Europe and on the lives of the people who lived there. The effects of climate change included rising sea levels, which resulted in flooding of low coastal areas and the creation of new high coastlines, and global warming, which resulted in significant changes to vegetation and animal communities. Paleobotanic research and pollen analysis documented a radical change from open tundra to widespread forests by 8000 BC. The retreating Arctic ice cap caused the extinction of larger animals such as mammoths. Larger herbivores such as reindeer followed the ice cap north, while the smaller red deer adapted to the forest by living in smaller herds, and others, such as roe deer and wild boar, adapted by extending their ranges. There were a greater variety of smaller animals available for food, such as wildfowl, and there were more coastal resources, such as fish and shellfish. The humans who inhabited this warmer landscape made social, economic, and technological adaptations to survive.



Clark demonstrated that the archaeology of the Mesolithic provides evidence of a more intense exploitation of this new environment by hunter-gatherers. Smaller-scale resources, such as shellfish, nuts, and small birds, became important parts of the human diet, and they developed new hunting and harvesting strategies to maximize seasonal forest and marine resources and broadened the basis of their subsistence to include more species. Domesticated dogs appeared at around this time, probably as an aid to hunting and killing animals. These economic and technological developments during the Mesolithic period made a greater degree of sedentism possible. Humans reoccupied seasonal sites on lakeshores and seashores and in forests and at rock shelters in expectation of seasonal resources. At some point they may have stayed year-round in expectation of these resources and the need to defend them and their territory. Abundant and reliable food sources also meant a growth in population, economic success and wealth, and the development of trade networks. Clark was convinced that some of the characteristics of the Neolithic period originated during the Mesolithic.



Further Reading Clark, J. G. D. 1932. The Mesolithic Age in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, J. G. D. 1936. The Mesolithic settlement of Northern Europe: A study of the food-gathering peoples of northern Europe during the early post-glacial period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fagan, B. 2001. Grahame Clark: An intellectual life of an archaeologist. Oxford: Westview. Rowley-Conwy, P. 1999. Sir Grahame Clark, 1907\u20131995. In Encyclopedia of archaeology: The great archaeologists, ed. T. Murray, 507\u2013529. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Rowley-Conwy, P. 2001. European Mesolithic. In Encyclopedia of archaeology: History and discoveries, ed. T. Murray, 478\u2013491. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.