Eleven thousand years ago, Lake Flixton – in what today is the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire – was at the centre of several shore settlements constructed by groups of hunter-gathers. Beside the reed-fringed waters, Mesolithic communities built shelters and large lake-edge platforms; butchered animals and processed plants and hides; and crafted an eclectic array of objects needed for both everyday and more enigmatic activities. Today, these groups, their constructions, and even Lake Flixton itself have long vanished from view, but the once-waterlogged landscape has preserved a wealth of archaeological evidence to illuminate our prehistoric predecessors.
Known as Star Carr, the site’s secrets were first revealed by John Moore in 1947, before more extensive excavations were carried out by Grahame Clark in 1949-1951, and by the Star Carr Archaeology Project in 2004-2015 (see CA 282 and 349). The best-known fruits of these investigations are the extraordinary organic finds preserved by the peat-rich soil – from the earliest evidence of carpentry in Britain to over 30 deer skull headdresses – but just as significant are the thousands of fragments of flint that have been recovered from the site. They represent the most prevalent and most consistently well-preserved archaeological material from Star Carr, with almost 42,000 pieces of knapped flint – including various tool-types, as well as waste flakes produced when items were made or resharpened – found during the most recent excavations.
Worked flints can offer illuminating information about the kinds of activity that were carried out on prehistoric sites. Traditionally, these interpretations have been based on grouping tools by type, and looking for ethnographic comparisons, where the ways that more contemporary hunter-gatherer communities use flint tools are projected on to how they were used in the Mesolithic. This approach that has, in the past, seen entire areas of occupation assigned to broad site-types – ‘home-base’, ‘hunting camp’, ‘butchery site’ – based on the frequency of different tool types found. It is possible to glean more nuanced insights, however, by looking at the tools themselves more closely.
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