New Radiocarbon Accelerator Dates on Artefacts From the Early Mesolithic Site of Star Carr, North Yorkshire*

Abstract

For the well-known early Mesolithic site of Star Carr, dating of organic artefacts by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) has been hampered by treatment of bone and antler recovered during the original excavations with preservatives. Some, untreated, artefacts were, however, collected after Clark's excavation in 1950. Four of these artefacts were AMS dated in 1995, but two of the dates were significantly younger than the others, and were questionable due to their low collagen yields. These suspect samples have now been re-analysed, demonstrating that all four artefacts are of similar date. The significance of these dates for the chronology of Star Carr is discussed.

Early Mesolithic Activity in the Wetlands of the Lake Flixton Basin

“…As several researchers have noted, the majority of these artefacts relate to the earlier phases of activity at the site (e.g. Dark et al 2006). Furthermore, assuming that the distribution of material in Cu ings I and II is representative of the whole assemblage, the deposition of most of these objects was very focused, both spatially and in terms of the environment into which they were deposited.…”

Inhabiting New Landscapes: Settlement and Mobility in Britain After the Last Glacial Maximum

“…11). There is also the first evidence for temporal depth: though in general people seem to have avoided reoccupying old sites, Star Carr was repeatedly reoccupied over a 350 year period (Mellars and Dark 1998; Dark et al . 2006).…”

Mesolithic Environments at Star Carr, the Eastern Vale of Pickering and Environs: Local and Regional Contexts

“…The unique status of Star Carr is due not to the prolific lithic assemblages recorded there, as these are represented on many Early Mesolithic sites, but rather to the remarkable degree of preservation of a wealth of organic cultural material within the archaeological horizons, and their stratification within deep, waterlogged, wetland sediments. Such secure organic stratification not only allowed radiocarbon dating of the cultural material, although the radiocarbon plateau of the first Holocene millennium makes meaningful calibration to calendar years problematic (Mellars 1990;Day and Mellars 1994;Dark 1998) and requiring much refi nement (Dark et al 2006;Conneller et al 2009), but has also permi ed the use of techniques of palaeoenvironmental reconstruction to place the cultural horizons within a detailed environmental context, both at the site level and beyond. There are local, extra-local and regional elements to the environmental context of Star Carr, and also that of the overall population of Early Mesolithic archaeological sites in the Yorkshire region ( Figure 1) with which Star Carr must be compared, not least those that also lie within the eastern Vale of Pickering (Conneller and SchadlaHall 2003).…”