With the joint support of the National Science Foundation and Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, Dr. Paul Pettitt (UK) and Dr. Marcy Rockman (USA) will conduct one year of research into the archaeology and geochemistry of the recolonization of Britain at the end of the last Ice Age. The project will bring together expertise in Palaeolithic and landscape archaeology and flint geology to examine the processes of cultural adaptation to new environments. The project will emphasize sites at Creswell Crags, the only location in Britain known to have late Ice Age cave art. At the end of the last Ice Age (ca. 15,000 years ago), Britain had been devoid of human populations for many millennia. As the climate warmed, however, hunter-gatherer groups returned to northern Europe, moving into the Paris Basin, the Middle Rhine and Meuse Valleys, and finally Britain. Successful recolonization of the British landscape required returning groups to develop anew knowledge about the nature and locations of major food resources and of high-quality workable flint used as the raw material for stone tools. Data from mainland Europe, where human groups were more continuously present and therefore data more abundant than for Britain, show that high-quality flints were carried for distances of up to 80-120 km, indicating conservation of critical stone tool materials over the course of seasonal migrations.
This project will reconstruct the flint transport patterns and related landscape learning processes for the hunter-gatherer groups who resettled Britain between 14-15,000 years ago. A pilot study demonstrated that regions of the flint-bearing Cretaceous Chalk formation can be distinguished using the virtually non-destructive laser ablation inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) technique of trace element characterization. Art identified at Creswell Crags are engravings and bas relief, rare in mainland Europe. Project tasks include 1) LA-ICP-MS characterization of geological sources of flint within the Cretaceous Chalk basin (which extends across southern and eastern England); 2) LA-ICP-MS analysis of flint artifacts from 13 late glacial sites across Britain, including sites at Creswell Crags; and 3) analysis of flint origin data with landform and recent radiocarbon data. The resulting picture of flint transport across Britain will allow comparison with data from mainland northern Europe.
The intellectual merit of this project is two-fold: first, it is the first detailed study of the geochemistry of flint, a widely used stone tool material in many time periods, in a manner that allows assessment of its use prior to flint mining in the Neolithic; second, it provides a behavioural framework for study of the cultural continuity and innovation indicated by the Creswell cave art by linking the art to spatial patterns created by common food and material tasks. The broader impacts of this study lie in the indications it will provide of how landscapes are learned; whether use of landscape in late glacial Britain was a relatively simple 'planting' of forms from the continent or an example of human social and economic flexibility and adaptability in a new and changing environment.
