Project investigates Stone Age life on moors
THE second phase of a project to discover more about life on and around the North York Moors thousands of years ago is about to get underway.
The North-East Yorkshire Mesolithic project will investigate areas of the moors, along the coast and in the Tees Valley that were previously inhabited by middle Stone Age people to build up a more detailed picture of how they lived from 10,000 to 4,000 BC.
With funding from English Heritage, the project is a partnership involving the North York Moors National Park Authority and the Hartlepool-based Tees Archaeology, the official archaeological service for four local unitary authorities in the area.
Specialists from Durham University will also be analysing pollen grains to assemble a picture of the Mesolithic environment and results from the project will be used to raise awareness and understanding of the period among visitors to the national park.
The project began because experts wanted to fill significant gaps in their knowledge of the local Mesolithic period, gained through limited sampling. The first phase involved a year inspecting collections held at local museums and English Heritage made funding available to extend the project for another two years.
Mags Waughman, the park authority's archaeological conservation officer, said: ''This is an exciting project which will give us a much clearer picture about the Mesolithic period - the time between the end of the last Ice Age and the appearance of early farming when the population was nomadic and lived by hunting and gathering wild foods.
''An initial stage of work gathering all the currently known evidence for the Mesolithic period was completed in 2006. Using this information, the second stage starting now will investigate some of the areas which we know were occupied by Mesolithic people to increase our knowledge of what their life was like.''
The park authority's archaeological volunteers will be shown how to recognise Mesolithic flint tools and identify sites from scatterings of flints sometimes found eroding on moorland footpaths. Once trained, they will be out on the moors throughout the summer and autumn looking for, and recording of evidence of, new sites.
The term Mesolithic comes from the Greek words mesos, meaning middle, and lithos, meaning stone. It was highlighted again by survival expert Ray Mears and botanist Gordon Hillman when they prompted people to learn more about Mesolithic diets in the BBC2 series Ray Mears' Wild Food.
Mesolithic people hunted fish and gathered nuts, fruits, berries and shellfish. Rivers and coastal waters provided fast routes for their nomadic lifestyle and forests yielded raw materials for dugout canoes. Temporary shelters were believed to have been built from wood and skins.
Sites from the period have been found in England, Ireland, Scotland, Serbia, Greece, Holland and Estonia. Implements such as flint arrowheads and needles and fish hooks made from bone have been discovered.
2:00am Thursday 27th March 2008
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