Mesolithic south west Scotland, lithic raw materials and regional settlement structure

Abstract

Regional approaches to the investigation of prehistoric settlement tend to be difficult in areas devoid of either economic, structural or stylistic evidence for the sequential use of the landscape. This is particularly the case in western Scotland where acid soils have contributed to the destruction of most 'soft' archaeological debris. Conversely however, evidence for the manufacture and maintenance of lithic artefacts is abundant in the form of extensive knapping waste. These tend to be spatially discrete however, located on the three island hot-spots of archaeological visibility, namely Rhum, Arran, and the Southern Hebrides archipelago of Islay, Jura and Colonsay. On all three, visibility is probably a function of access to fine grained lithic raw materials.

On the basis of the heterogeneous distribution of these, this thesis takes a regional approach to the Mesolithic settlement of western Scotland. By tracing the movement and differential use of lithic raw materials from Arran to Skye, a model of regional scale integration, but with lower levels of sub-regional mobility is proposed.

This research contributes to the Mesolithic of western Scotland in two substantive ways. Firstly, the regional beach survey has clarified the nature and distribution of beach pebbles as a viable source of flint. Although the beaches have long been recognised as the primary source of flint, their distribution throughout the region, and density at the island scale remained unclear. Survey undertaken at both these scales highlighted the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the deposits. This has significant implications for archaeological visibility in the region, differential raw material use, and the temporal dimension of the beaches as flint sources. Secondly, an approach is developed which makes use of the consistent relationship between volume and surface area in spherical beach pebble raw materials. This provides a useful means for investigating assemblage structure in terms of the nature of raw materials being used. The consistent relationship between proportions of debitage types provides a means for comparing assemblages against an experimental template for which raw material starting conditions are known.

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