by Paul Elliott
We know that hunter-gatherers moved from lowland areas in the winter where they carried out communal activities, to upland areas in the summer where they dispersed into smaller groups. It is a feature of many subsistence cultures today. Studies of flint tools have found that the upland camps were places where hunting points were made, while other tools, such as scrapers, were used in the winter camps to prepare animal skins. Although the families moved according to a seasonal round, they were also flexible and could alter their plans and use alternate resources and alternate camp sites. Should the band head up the river to catch brown trout? Or to the moorland where deer were more easily tracked? What about heading to Bridlington Bay where abundant shellfish could be collected? Each decision was weighted with important considerations of time, effort, and return. Deer supplied a great deal of meat, along with hide, bone, antler, and sinew—however, hunting deer was risky and several weeks may pass without a sure kill. Tracks may be missed, wounded deer may escape, or may avoid the arrows and spears of the hunters altogether. Contrast this with the surety of collecting hawthorn and juniper berries, which provide much needed sustenance, but at a high price in time and energy devoted to collecting and processing.
It is likely that every hunter-gatherer band moved between at least three separate locales within the year, and probably more. At each site there would be a number of resources to exploit from a number of well-known and well-used camp sites. Tent poles, hearths, and wooden cooking tripods could all be left in situ until the hunters returned, or could be left behind for the benefit of others. Canadian tribes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries considered such a practice bad luck, however, and always dismantled their camps. Perhaps the Star Carr hunters did the same.
Steven Mithen believes that the basic unit of Mesolithic society was the family, and that families lived together for a large part of the year (most likely the winter months) in communities of up to 100 individuals. This ‘band’ may have had contact with others in the region, establishing a social network spanning hundreds of kilometres. It is highly likely that families or bands moved from one region to another, travelling great distances on foot and engaging in trade and social relations with other bands.
From ethnographic studies, it is likely these hunting bands were probably egalitarian, without a dominant chief. Yet the uneven spread of resources across Europe meant that some bands had access to more than their neighbours. Hunting bands may well have had different levels of ‘wealth’, there were no rich individuals, but there were certainly groups who had more status, due to rich hunting grounds or trade links for exotic materials.
Tools and Technology
Popular images of Stone Age folk are dominated by brutish men and women clad in the skins of wild animals. Certainly the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers relied upon the animals they hunted for the raw materials of clothing, but it wasn’t until the well-preserved remains of Ötzi the Ice Man were discovered in 1991 that archaeologists realised just how sophisticated the achievements of these people were.
This traveller, hiking through the Alps around 3300 BC, was killed by assailants and his body preserved by the cold, covered by winter snowfall and then frozen in the glacial ice. Although he dates from a much later period, his clothing follows the Mesolithic tradition of using only grasses and animal skins, rather than textiles. Yet Ötzi’s clothing was designed and constructed with considerable skill, he did not wear a slap-dash covering of deerskins, but a carefully constructed set of clothes designed to protect him from the chilly Alpine weather.
Ötzi wore a tunic, loincloth, and leggings all of goatskin, a long calf-skin belt, a cap of bear fur, shoes made from a variety of animal hides, and a woven grass cape. With so many deer appearing on the Star Carr menu, it is likely that the hunter’s tunic, loincloth, and leggings would be of deerskin. The tunic was not elaborate, it may have been as simple as a rectangle wrapped around the body, held in place with a strap over the shoulder and the wide leather belt at the waist, or it may have had sleeves. Sleeved garments are known from the Bronze Age, but that is still over 7,000 years in the future.
The goatskin leggings were crucial to an Alpine man like Ötzi, and may have been used during the winters of Mesolithic Britain. They were, essentially, tubes of goatskin pulled over each leg with laces at the top and bottom that allowed them to be tied to shoe and belt, preventing them from ‘riding up’.
Although the Ice Man’s shoes were of a complex design, Mesolithic shoes were very likely much simpler affairs. Some of the oldest Neolithic shoe designs were simply an oval of deerskin with slits around the edge. The shoe was bound to the foot by threading a lace through the slits and pulling it tight, and around the instep by another lace passing under the shoe. A prehistoric example of this design is the Schindejoch shoe, found in the Netherlands, but this simple shoe design also survived into the historical period. The Drumacoon ‘bag shoe’ was found in an Irish peat bog and dates to the early Medieval period. Another version, surviving on the west coast of Ireland into the nineteenth century, was the ‘pampootie’—a traditional skin shoe with the fur left on the outside. Ötzi’s shoes had an upper part made of bearskin, but like the pampootie, the fur was left on the outside.
The author has made himself a pair of shoes that follow this basic design, using red deer skin, with the hair on the outside, and a with a lace of goatskin. They were very comfortable, and weathered soft snow very well, the hairs providing much needed grip while walking. Rain or wet grass proved to be a serious weakness, however, and the shoes were quickly soaked. The simple method of binding without fine stitching meant that the shoes were far from waterproof, but that may have been a factor that prehistoric men and women were happy to cope with. Protection from stones, thorns and twigs may instead have motivated the hunters to fashion shoes for themselves.
It might seem that these clothes were nothing more than crude animal skins, yet they required cleaning, tanning, and stitching. Marks made by flint scrapers were found on the inside of Ötzi’s tunic, and chemical analysis shows that the skins were tanned with animal fat and wood smoke. Each goatskin panel was stitched to its neighbour with twisted sinew in a cross-stitch technique. Protection from the British weather may have come from a grass cape, similar to the one found with the Ice Man, or from a hide cloak that could have been made waterproof by smearing with animal fat, as peasants are known to have done in the Roman Empire.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Ötzi’s clothing was his calfskin belt, long enough to wrap around his waist twice, and with an integral sewn-in pouch. This little pouch, tucked beneath his tunic and capable of being laced shut, contained his most important items—his survival kit. Here he carried tinder fungus used for lighting fires, a bone awl used in leatherwork, and three flint tools (a scraper, a drill, and a flint blade).
With these essentials, a Mesolithic hunter could skin an animal, clean its hide, and turn it into clothing or other useful objects. Like many traditional groups, the people of the Mesolithic would have travelled lightly, carrying only what they needed to live off the land. Of maximum importance are tools made of flint, a stone that cannot be relied upon to be at hand when it is needed. With flint, a huge number of practical tools could be made and tiny blades (microliths) could be fashioned and fixed to spear-points. Almost every other tool was taken from the forest or from the animals brought down on the hunt.
What else might the Star Carr families be expected to carry with them? We have already mentioned tinder fungus, but nodules of iron pyrite might also be gathered from local beaches. Struck with a sharp flint, these pyrites send sparks into the fungus, which can cause it to smoulder. The heat is enough to set alight a handful of dry grasses. The nomadic Evenk people of Siberia carry embers from the morning fire with them on a trek, using it to start their evening camp fire. They do this by placing a glowing ember into a small birch bark pot filled with green leaves. A pot just like this was found wi
th Ötzi.
A knife is essential for survival even today; it is a versatile tool and in the Mesolithic was fashioned from flint and mounted in a handle with glue-like birch resin. Ötzi’s flint dagger had an ash-wood handle and he had made a scabbard for it from woven bark fibre. Most likely he made the dagger, as well as his other tools, himself. The Star Carr hunters were likewise equally self-reliant. Ötzi carried another important tool with which he fashioned other tools. It was a pressure flaker, a fire-hardened point of deer antler embedded in a handle of lime wood. Pressure flakers are used in flint knapping to create a good cutting edge on a flint blade, and to alter the shape of the flake to suit a particular need. With a pebble and a pressure flaker, any hunter could reliably fashion new scrapers, blades, and microliths.
The microliths were quickly worked to become razor-sharp arrowheads. They provided a nasty cutting edge and were bound onto arrow shafts with birch resin. Although no bows were found at the lakeside, bows from the later Neolithic have been discovered at Holmegaard and Ringkloster (Denmark), Edington Burtle (England), and elsewhere. They are a type known as a stave or flat bow, tillered from a single piece of elm or yew, and capable of considerable penetrative power. Every hunter at Lake Flixton would also have owned a spear, tipped with a flint flake and fastened with fibre cord and pine resin.
The Business of Hunting
If modern ethnographic studies can be used as a comparison, hunting will have been an exclusively male preserve, while the women raised children, tended camp, and gathered berries, nuts, and roots. Most of these food products required some form of processing before they were edible, and different foodstuffs required more or less labour to achieve this.
What was available around the banks of Lake Flixton? The tribe was certainly able to collect birds’ eggs. Water birds like stork, heron, goose, moorhen, and whooper swan will have nested in the reed beds around the lake and the nests would have been quite accessible. If Star Carr was indeed a winter camp, then the tribe will have been able to catch ducks and collect duck eggs. Hornsea Mere, a shallow glacial lake of the same proportions as Lake Flixton laying some 40 km away, is still an annual destination for thousands of ducks from breeding grounds all over Europe. These include mallard, teal, and widgeon in the shallows and diving ducks such as pochard, goldeneye, and tufted duck. Working together, with boys beating the reeds with sticks, ducks could be flushed toward hunters who held out nets woven out of nettle fibre. In a world without cookpots, the duck eggs could be eaten by knocking a hole in the top and left in embers to cook in their own ‘pot’. I have found this a great way to cook eggs in the hearth, with care needed not to let the egg tip over. Eggs can also be wrapped in moss and left to ‘steam’ until hardboiled. Birds provided feathers, fat, oil, and skin—at Star Carr, a bead was found made from a bird bone.
In the reeds themselves, a grub over 2 cm long can be found, which is large enough to have been worth collecting. Insects and grubs are still a source of nutrition for some tribes today. Other lakeside food sources included toads, crayfish, and freshwater mussels. Knowledge must have been passed down about these food sources; glands behind the toad’s eyes, for example, are poisonous.
Meat was obtained from the great range of mammals that populated the vast Mesolithic forests of Britain. These included red and roe deer, wild boar, elk, and auroch. Aurochs were made extinct in the seventeenth century and were a species of giant wild cattle. There were plenty of other mammals, too; some were killed for their skins, bones, or teeth, while others might have been killed in self-defence. Some, like red fox, wild cat, badger, stoat, and weasel, are still found in British woodlands (and were probably snared by Mesolithic hunters). Others, like lynx, wolf, bear, and beaver, were made extinct long ago and are now found only on the European mainland. Only one animal had been successfully domesticated—the dog (a descendant of the grey wolf), which was almost certainly used in hunting. Wild boar are still hunted with dogs in some parts of the world today. The dogs bring the boar to bay giving the hunter time to catch up and then dispatch the wild pig himself. Boars were prized by hunters throughout prehistory, probably for their fat, which proved to be valuable energy source in such an active and mobile society.
The business of hunting also involves the building and setting of traps and in the Mesolithic these would have employed pliant saplings, and nooses and snares made of cord. Much smaller prey were probably hunted and trapped by the boys of the tribe, as happens today within tribes like the Hadza in Tanzania. Dormice, red squirrels, hedgehogs, small birds, shrew, and voles would all have made easy snacks for hunters or their sons, but unfortunately there is almost no record of these creatures on Mesolithic sites. Aside from the wooden paddle and the 191 beautifully carved antler harpoon heads, neither is there much hard evidence for fishing at Star Carr, yet fish must have formed an important part of Mesolithic diet, particularly at a lakeside settlement like Star Carr. Fish traps made of willow branches are known from some Mesolithic sites, but barbed harpoons, nets, and canoes would all have aided the fisherman. Rolls of birch bark were found at the Lake Flixton site, and these may well have been the floats for fishing nets; similar fishing floats were used by Scandinavian fishermen until recently.
One tradition that is common to many hunters from tribal societies is the removal, and eating, of the animal’s liver. Cooked quickly in the embers of a fire it provides instant sustenance for the exhausted hunters. It is tempting to picture the Star Carr hunters celebrating a kill in this way. Once the animal had been carried back to the settlement, it required butchering and, of course, nothing was wasted. The hunter brought to his tribe food, skins for clothing and shoes, antler for harpoon heads and mattocks, bone for awls and needles, and sinew for use as thread, bowstrings, and snares.
In camp the carcass would have been bled to ensure the meat would keep, this also purged the meat of its strong taste. Blood would probably have been caught and drunk, as happens in some modern hunting cultures. Next, the animal was skinned. The hide of the wild pig, however, holds a lot of fat, forcing the hunters to scald or burn off the hair, before beginning the butchery. Flint tools were used to butcher the carcass, as tell-tale cut marks on surviving Mesolithic bone show. The placement of these marks indicate that the hunters butchered animals in much the same way as we do today, this is a skill to be learnt, with weak points exploited by flint blades and muscle power.
Nicky Milner, who has directed excavations at Star Carr, suggested that the meat of a large animal, such as a red deer, auroch, or elk, might be smoked or dried in order to preserve as much of the meat as possible for later consumption. A simple wooden rack or platform built over hot embers could have served as a method for smoking strips of meat, and a pile of leaves from a hardwood tree dumped onto the embers would have provided the preserving smoke.
The Business of Gathering
Skill and knowledge of the natural world were both key to Mesolithic survival. It was not simply a matter of being ‘lucky on the hunt’, but of understanding where food was and how it could be most efficiently gathered. Survival often meant weighing up how much energy needed to be expended to collect and process a foodstuff against how much energy (how many calories) that food would ultimately provide. Digging up the edible roots of a plant might well provide a hearty meal, if done at the right time of the year, but done out of season, the digger would go hungry and would have expended costly physical effort with no return. Knowledge of life cycles—of trees, plants, and animals—held the secret to successful gathering. Of course not all plants in Britain can be eaten and several species are actually poisonous. Skill was needed not just to know which was which, but also which part of a plant might cause harm. Cuckoopint, for example, has an edible root that is harmful if not cooked; the rest of the plant is also poisonous. Likewise, the leaves of nettles are notorious for their painful sting, but once boiled in water they become edible.
Nuts are an obvious Mesolithic
food source, and hazelnuts seem to have been especially popular. Piles of charred hazelnut shells have been found at many sites from this period, including an excavated campsite on the Scottish island of Colonsay. Although nuts are not easy to digest without cooking, they are rich in protein and packed with calories.
The green leaves of many plants are also edible, but will become bitter once the plant begins to flower. One way that Mesolithic gatherers might have extended the use of a resource like this would have been to cut back any new shoots, promoting the growth of new and more succulent leaves. Other parts of the plant, such as seeds or the tips of new shoots, can also be harvested. Mesolithic sites across northern Europe have yielded many finds of water lily seeds, which must have been eaten by hunter-gatherers at Star Carr and elsewhere. Seeds, although easily gathered, require a good deal of processing in order to make them palatable. Typically, seeds are parched or toasted, and then ground into a flour ready for cooking. It is the exploitation of grass seeds that ultimately led to the practice of agriculture.
In Britain there are almost a hundred species of edible roots and these will have provided the tribes with a source of energy-rich carbohydrates. Those plants with edible roots provide a valuable resource that can often be exploited throughout the year unlike, of course, leaves, seeds, and nuts. However, these perennial roots often lose their above-ground parts at certain times of the year and so local knowledge would have been needed to find the buried roots. Some of the roots are produced by biennial plants, whose life cycle is spread over the course of two years. If the roots aren’t dug up in the first year, then the root becomes worthless, since all of the goodness being stored there is used by the plant to grow its second-year shoots and flowers.