Did you know that the Mesolithic was invented in The North?  Well, that’s perhaps not strictly true but, as Ashley Brodey explained to us in November, a lot of the peat in northern and northwest England started to form during the Mesolithic period (~9,600 to 4,000 in Britain).  As it grew, this Pennine and Lake District peat buried many Mesolithic site, which were re-exposed, millennia later, and discovered by the pioneers of Mesolithic studies in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Hence the geographic association.

This lecture from Ashley Brogan took us through the origin of the study of the Mesolithic (the term was only coined in 1866).  Then Ashley’s lecture split into two parts:  firstly, her academic studies, involving statistical analysis of the distribution of Mesolithic sites in northern England and, secondly, an example of her professional work assessing the archaeology of ecological restoration sites.

The Historical Environmental Record (HER) for this region shows distinct Mesolithic ‘hot-spots’, rich in lithic finds (flint tools and fragments).  Ashley’s research has looked into the distribution of these apparently ‘persistent places’.  Were they sites that Mesolithic hunter gatherers repeatedly returned to?  Or was the apparent pattern down to other factors?

Upon closer analysis, there was a strong correlation between these localities, where some of the ‘Mesolithic’ archaeologists lived and along the walking routes accessible from their homes.  This appears to have created what’s known as a ‘recovery bias’ in the data on the distribution of Mesolithic sites in northern England.  Another potential factor that Ashley investigated was a ‘visibility bias’.  Most sites were found between elevations of 366 m and 488 m, which is also were you find most peat erosion in these areas.

A corollary of this is that Darwen Moor (just north of Bolton) and the Forest of Bowland had relatively little peat erosion and were also not very accessible to the public, during the peak Mesolithic collecting period. They have both provided very few Mesolithic finds but that does not  necessarily mean that there was never any activity there in the Mesolithic period.

Ashley’s conclusions were that you should not take apparent clusters in the archaeological record at face value and she is planning more studies of the HER data and interviews with modern collectors to shed more light on the subject.