The Museum Gardens in York are home to an impressive array of historic buildings, from the dramatic medieval ruins of St Mary’s Abbey to the imposing Roman masonry of the Multangular Tower, as well as the neo-classical grandeur of the Yorkshire Museum itself. During the second half of August, though, visitors to the site could also see a temporary new neighbour to these structures – rather more humble in scale, but based on much older remains: a reconstructed Mesolithic house that was based on evidence from Star Carr.
Around 11,000 years ago, the shores of Lake Flixton (near Scarborough in North Yorkshire) were fringed with occupation sites used by hunter-gatherer communities. Although the lake has long since vanished from the landscape, the environment’s still-waterlogged and peat-rich conditions have preserved an astonishing array of organic remains, offering invaluable insights into what life was like in the years after the end of the last Ice Age (see CA 282 and 349).
The most famous of these sites is Star Carr, which was discovered by John Moore in 1947, and excavated first by Grahame Clark in 1949-1951, and more recently by Nicky Milner (University of York), Chantal Conneller (then University of Manchester, now Newcastle University), and Barry Taylor (University of Chester) in 2004-2015. These investigations recovered diverse artefacts, ranging from practical tools used for everyday tasks like butchery, crafting, fishing, and lighting fires to items of jewellery and enigmatic antler headdresses – some of which can currently be seen in Star Carr: Life after the ice, an exhibition running at the Yorkshire Museum until spring 2026 (see here).
Seventy years of tiddlywinks