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SLIDE 1&2 3
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1. The build up of soils, sediments and peats
2. Colonization of Birch, aspen, hazel, interspersed with willow and the
later arrival of oak.
3. Colonization of reeds, rushes, sedges, waterlilies.
4. Populations of red deer, elk, auroch, boar, beaver, hedgehog. Bear, wolf
and frogs
5. A dog jaw bone.
6. Bird populations of egret, buzzard, grebe, loon.
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The site has yielded incredible artefact assemblages unparalleled in Britain for
the quality of preservation, the diversity and also quantity.
1. Antler and bone barb points, increased the total amount in Britain 20 fold.
2. Birch bark rolls interpreted as sources of pitch in artefact construction
3. Antler mattocks one of which was still hafted.
4. tens of thousands of lithic artefact, in fact Star Carr assemblage is a
Mesolithic ‘type’ assemblage
5. The stag antler frontlets, a constant source of speculation and discussion.
Practicle, ornamental, ritual.
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Evidence suggests that the platform would serve to stabilize the lake edge and
Clark speculated that it could have been utilized as a landing stage for small
watercraft.
Mellars uncovered worked timbers in VP85 they had been split into planks and
looked to have been placed in parallel to each other.
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The research questions that have dominated study of Star Carr can be easily
broken down into major categories.
1. Chronolgy. When was the site occupied? brushwood platform 9488± 350
bp by Libby Britain’s first radiocarbon date. The timber platform giving a
date of 9640±70 bp
2. How long was the site occupied? Clark’s interpretation was for two
occupation intervals separated by an expanse of several generations. He
identified two design styles in the barbed points that were also separated
in different contexts. In the 80s Mellars’ application of AMS dating
identified three contexts with higher occurrences of charcoal. These were
dated and have a sequence spanning three possible occupation events
from 9640±70 bp to 9385±115bp.
3. At what season was the site occupied?. Based on the shedding of antlers,
the presence of deer skulls with antlers attached and the mandibles of
hunted animals interpretation has ranged from winter occupation and
summer occupation. Stone artifacts and other resources further suggest
the longe-range mobility of Mesolithic groups obtaining flint from the
Wolds, amber from the coast and hunting animals in the Pennines.
4. What kind of settlement was Star Carr? Again this question has inspired
many interpretations from being a temporary hunting camp, a permanent
winter base camp and also either a place of productive activity or a place
of discard a so-called toss zone. Clark speculated the site was occupied
by around four family units and that he’d excavated the full extent of the
site. Further test pitting by Mellars indicated that the site extended over a
much larger area and current estimations suggest that as little as 5% of
the site has been excavated.
5. Less so but more so recently questions surrounding the social and
ideological lives of Star Carr’s inhabitants have arisen. Clark mentions
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the activities of men, women and children and possible rituals involving
red deer masks. Mellars interpreted the increased frequencies of charcoal
in some of the contexts as evidence of reed burning and a form of fire
stick economy. Conneller has discussed the site as a special locale,
repeatedly returned to as a significant area. The unusual deposition of so
many barbed points when the other sites have yielded only one seems to
suggest that the site is an anomaly in the Mesolithic landscape.
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Where do these research questions come from? Exploring this question it soon
becomes apparent that the use of analogy has been integral to the study of Star
Carr.
As Spikins has pointed out these research questions can be easily traced back to
Clark’s 1972 Star Carr a case study in Bioarchaeology. Clark’s states that at the
same time as the discovery of Star Carr he was progressing theoretically from
being solely concerned with typology and stratigraphy. Clark had been
interested in these aspects to arrive at a relative date for the site. Clark used
Godwin’s pollen zones these were based on analogies of ecological zones from
different latitudes to determine the vegetation progression and colonization of
the British Isles from the end of the Ice Age. Clark also used artefact
typological analogies to suggest cultural affiliations with Scandinavian and
Northern European Mesolithic sites.
Clark had become increasingly interested in the environment not solely as a
temporal indicator but as a cultural one. Clark identified Mesolithic populations
as hunter-gatherers and based his interpretations on functional anthropological
and cultural ecological theories of the time. Therefore the environment became
an indicator of the cultural forms of human populations that existed within it.
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Cultural change could be described through the interaction of environmental
subsystems interacting and directly affecting cultural subsystems.
Thus British Mesolithic studies paralleled hunter-gatherer studies with an
agenda borrowed from anthropology and cultural ecology typified by the
research questions at Star Carr. Is it possible to identify further the origins of
these research questions and Clark’s and others identification of the Mesolithic
as the realm of H&Gs?
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This is not difficult as Clark is emphatic in Excavations at Star Carr that he was
searching for a site to illustrate a step in evolutionary progression firstly in
relation to Maglomosian sites throughout Europe. Secondly he intended to
illustrate the differences in occupation densities of Mesolithic and early
Neolithic sites. This is the underlying factor in how Clark even recorded the site
of flint accumulations per square yard.
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This evolutionary agenda can be easily identified in the very foundations of
Prehistoric studies and ethnographic analogy has been fundamental to this
course of study.
In 1865 one of prehistory’s founding fathers John Lubbock published the book
“Pre-Historic Times as illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and
Customs of Modern Savages.”
The concept of a primitive point from which populations would evolve in
increasing complexity became part of the colonizing philosophy of the
European and American Empires. Making modern populations primitive by
comparing them with a less civilized European origin it was possible to ‘speed’
up their evolution by disenfranchising them from their lands, indoctrinating
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them into the Empire or deselecting them through acts of genocide. Comparing
the past to modern ‘primitives’ reinforced the philosophy of Western superiority
and sophisticated complexity. Therefore, as the World was colonized, human
history was equally colonized by conceptual means.
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There are plenty of cultural analogies derived from research at Star Carr some
are quite specific yet most are very vague. They are from all over the world and
they come from studies that range in time. From recent photographic evidence,
dinka, to 18th century texts, the poor of Denmark and this is just a quick
selection from Clark and Mellars.
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In 1954 as Clark published Excavations at Star Carr Christopher Hawkes
famous paper appeared that condemned using analogy to climb his ladder of
inference as a pointless exercise without historical texts showing direct links.
Many people have voiced criticisms of the use cultural analogy. Gordon Childe
in 1958 ridiculed anyone trying to compare Australian pre-contact populations
with prehistoric human ones as a waste of time.
Questions arose as to how effective a straight analogous comparison actually
was. Populations were separated by large expanses of space, exactly how was it
to be expected that people in Northern England, for example, would be
expected to behave exactly like Native Americans from the West Coast of
North America?
How could people be connected through large amounts of time? The
uniformitarian argument was that supposed noble savages had existed in a
Garden of Eden like state unchanged over many millennia. Even this concept
could be made fallible by the theory of cultural ecology in that the environment
was in constant flux.
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A seemingly safer use of analogy is by using it a smaller scale or Middle Range.
In this guise questions about how baskets are woven or how fish traps are used
can illuminate the lacuna in our own forgotten knowledge. Lewis Binford’s
work on activity patterns through artefact scatters in relationship to activity
areas has been used effectively at various prehistoric sites stimulating an evergrowing field of ethnoarchaeology.
Researchers such as Peter Jordan and Marek Zvelebil advocate studying
populations that can be regarded as in situ as hunter-gatherers that are
geographically proximate to archaeological populations. If this is so then are we
not ourselves geographically proximate to our Mesolithic forebears?
Since the 1980s some anthropological, and hunter-gatherer studies in North
America, Australia and Africa have shifted from their environmentally
deterministic research frames and have become more concerned with
individuals and social lives, their extremely complex relationships and
cosmologies. This research has shed light on the incredible complex lifeways
and also scrutinized and criticized previous abstract concepts of seasonality and
mobility. It has been especially critical of environmental determinism and
shown how supposed H&G’s can have incredible control over their resources.
Yet British Mesolithic studies and therefore hunter-gatherer studies have lagged
far behind and social aspects at Star Carr have been little more than speculations
although this has changed slightly in the last few years. In my opinion this is
because there is no pressure to abandon environmentally deterministic models
as there are no present populations to critique the method. The people of the
Mesolithic cannot complain about being portrayed as primitive.
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It is with these criticisms in my mind that I steamed full head into my own use
of analogy and my increasing interest into social aspects of Star Carr.
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I wanted to imagine the environment and create a clearer picture of some of the
activities around the structures uncovered in the 50s and 80s. After excavating
there in 2006 I had been increasingly frustrated with the data presented in
Clark’s and Mellars’ publications and built simple computer models to see if
anything looked a little different or better. The poor quality of vegetational
illustrations also stimulated me to look for modern analogs.
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1. British sites no deer no beaver.
2. American sites better
3. Brushwood platform
4. American sites no people
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I did know of one site that was accessible, contained a mobile foraging
community that lived around a reed-fringed lake.
I’ve come to call this place Star Crack, a word play because this population is a
homeless population in the middle of Brooklyn and several of the individuals
smoke crack, in fact a large part of their foraging existence is based around
getting drunk or high and occasionally eating.
I also regarded this as an interesting experiment in using analogy, as I hadn’t
selected a Mesolithic-like population it was un-primitive. At first this was going
to be a straight shot at seeing how people moved around, created structures and
created refuse and debitage. I wanted to track this project through several
seasons and work out how on earth anyone goes about observing someone else.
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Recording beyond photography is problematic because the mental health issues
and the location make measured recording impossible. I have talked briefly to
some of them and I’ve also been violently threatened. The last thing you want to
do around a desperate person is flash an expensive camera.
My first observations surrounded
1. How do people access the water’s edge?
2. How are paths made and where do they go?
3. What happens to the reeds over time?
4. How do people live in reeds?
5. My overall impression what is it that makes these people ‘homeless?’
Peter Ucko stated in 1968 that analogy is most useful when it awakens the
researcher to personal prejudices when going back to assess archaeological data.
It made me rethink some of the platforms and the time frames of construction at
Star Carr, the ephemeral nature of some things and the persistence of others. I
think I have made a picture in my own mind that influences my interpretation of
the site.
The use of analogy, including my own, has been flawed. This does not mean
that its use has been negated. In fact the continued use of ethnographic and
ethnoarchaeological research has changed our concepts and models of the past
and highlighted prejudices and suprematist biases within research.
Contemporary hunter-gatherer-forager communities seem somehow to be used
as the texts that Prehistorians must rely on to interpret our own past and I don’t
see a way of conducting research without the use of analogy but the use of
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analogy must become more nuanced and creative. The use of analogy should be
a two-way street and an engagement with the past should also be an engagement
with the present.
I’ve become increasingly interested in the people themselves, their
personalities, their histories and their trajectories. But how does this relate to the
Mesolithic beyond a critical attack on standard research questions? I believe the
more we include ourselves as proximate to our Mesolithic ancestors in these
analogies the more balanced and useful they become and they can have a direct
relevance to how our own society is constructed.
Due to the ongoing engagement of using analogy I began to question the
concepts of settlement, seasonality and mobility -the paradigms of Mesolithic
research. This study has highlighted that the distinction is difficult to make
between the supposed transience of a mobile group as compared to the
domiciled, the people in the park are domiciled and permanent inhabitants the
people who return to their apartments around the park are seasonally mobile and
transient by comparison. I have begun to research what it is to be homeless and
its relationship to mental illness and substance abuse. Homelessness has a long
history that can be textually dated back to the 14 th century. Traditional
Itinerants, Gypsies and Romanies can all claim ancient origins so there are
always people who exist outside of our own civilized hegemony. It has made
me question what it means to be domiciled or un-settled. The dichotomy
between these two social milieus is directly relevant to the supposed dichotomy
of living practices between foragers and farmers. This is supposed to be the
difference between Mesolithic and Neolithic subsistence practices defined by an
evolutionary model.
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If this model is correct then any exploration of these social differences should
be meaningful.
It has made me question the supposed structure of our own society and what it
means to be removed from it or to be forgotten by it. How is the Mesolithic
really different from other periods in the terms of social structure? Do we
attribute terms that make ourselves very different from Mesolithic communities.
What happens if we use hunter-gatherer models on our own societies, how
different would we appear?
I wasn’t sure about this until I read an article in the latest issue of Cambridge
Archaeological Review written by Glasgow University staff. This article
attempts to define the individual as a social and civil construction that could
only be achieved from the 16th century onward. This is a western absurdism and
elitism that denies anyone unbounded by our enlightened civilization a right to
be individually reflexive. This continues a primitivization of people who are
considered outside of our Western society both spatially and temporally.
Although homeless people are separated or excluded from society are they still
socially and individually constructed by it? Can one become deconstructed from
contemporary society and does this deconstruction remove the self from the
individual? If society has increased in complexity what happens if this
complexity is pared down from a modern community, are we left with a
prehistoric community?
Do people in prehistory have the right to be individuals?
The lives of the homeless and our attitude toward them mimics previous
attitudes and plights of indigenous groups that have suffered exclusion,
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dispossession, resettlement and the ravages of depression alcoholism and drug
abuse. Is there some part of our population that may have a proclivity toward
alcoholism and homelessness? Evolutionary psychologists often argue that the
thousands of years’ humans spent as hunters and gatherers make us adapted to
certain life conditions, dietary needs and neurologically determined behaviors.
Is it at all possible that the continued appearance of homeless people is an echo
of the culture shock that hunter-gatherers in Europe experienced due to
increasing settlements of domiciled people and that some people’s need for
certain lifeways go unrealized?
Does mental illness become exacerbated by domicile and the lack of privacy?
How does schizophrenia, for example, manifest in communities around the
world? Is mental illness a part of the socially constructed self?
If we only study the past for the sake of the past itself or to merely illustrate it
then we are in danger of becoming dilettantes. I believe Gordon Childe to be
right in expecting archaeology to be a social phenomenon and that research into
the past has a lot to inform the present and even the future.
As Ucko stated analogy is a way of opening up the mind to possibilities and on
a simple level it has aided some of my interpretations of what has been revealed
at Star Carr. Importantly this study for me has shown a way that Mesolithic
research can be directly relevant to questions surrounding the creation of the
individual, social construction and a way to inform our attitudes to the needs of
people who fall through the cracks of our own socially constructed lives.
Prehistoric research can be directly relevant to psychology, sociology and
possibly even social policy as a critique of the prejudices that exist in regards to
people that we perceive to be excluded from ourselves.
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