Archaeological discoveries from Blick Mead, a Mesolithic ‘home base’ located beside a spring c.2.5km from Stonehenge, have been revelatory, uncovering extensive evidence of hunter-gatherer communities coming together to create thousands of flint tools and to share elaborate feasts (see CA 325, 324, and 271). Until recently, however, analyses of the site’s sediments indicated that preservation of environmental evidence within them was poor. Any chance of relating Blick Mead’s long and detailed radiocarbon date sequence for occupation (spanning c.8000-3600 BC, it is unique for north-western Europe) to evidence for how the landscape looked and changed across those four millennia was seemingly stymied.
This was a problem as, since the identification of Blick Mead’s Mesolithic importance, there has been increasing debate as to whether the monumental archaeology of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site was created in an uninhabited forested landscape, or whether it was constructed in an already partly open area of pre-existing significance to late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Given the fact that the later stages of Blick Mead’s occupation overlap with the construction of the first elements of the Stonehenge landscape, the site is of significance to the global discussion about the exact relationship between incoming farmers and ‘indigenous’ hunter-gatherers at the dawn of the Neolithic period. Therefore, there was a strong set of incentives to involve the very latest scientific techniques and see if it was possible to identify more eco facts about Blick Mead and its locale. In 2019, a collaboration between Southampton University, the University of Buckingham, UiT Tromsø, and the University of Vienna (created as a result of the long-standing interest in Blick Mead of Southampton University’s Professor Tony Brown) provided such an opportunity.
As our investigation (which was first published in PLOS ONE; see ‘Further reading’) began, the first step was to carry out a 20m borehole survey across the floodplain close to Blick Mead, to ascertain the local topography and likely Mesolithic contexts. Samples were also taken from already known Mesolithic contexts in trenches that had been opened on the terrace, the spring, and the interface between them. Ancient DNA (aDNA) content in the sampled sediments was processed by specialists at UiT Tromsø and Southampton University, and the samples were dated using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) techniques by the University of Vienna. These dates were set against those already obtained from radiocarbon dating by the University of Buckingham and, taken together, the work confirmed the presence and extent of prehistoric horizons dating from the very Late Upper Palaeolithic/Early Mesolithic, c.9160 BC (the earliest date recovered from Blick Mead and, indeed, from the Stonehenge World Heritage Site), to the very Late Mesolithic period.
