Archaeological investigations in advance of large-scale quarrying have led to several campaigns of evaluation and excavation of multi-period remains on the Greensand north of Bletchingley in Surrey. Following recognition of spreads and concentrations of Mesolithic flints across the infilled head of a valley at North Park Farm, an area roughly 130 x 90m in extent, the results of targeted excavations in 2002 and 2005 are reported in this monograph. In addition to various archaeological and geological evaluation trenches, some 453m2 were individually examined by hand excavation and selective sieving, producing a collection of more than 50,000 Mesolithic flint artefacts, including over 1000 microliths.
Phil Jones comprehensively describes the background to the project, the earlier fieldwork, and the main excavation season in 2005, drawing together in understandable form a complicated set of twelve sub-site interventions, each with its own idiosyncrasies of archaeology, stratigraphy and recording. The three pull-out pages of coloured plans and sections are invaluable for following the text description.
No doubt much to the frustration of the excavators, however, actual Mesolithic features proved elusive. Although several ‘hearths’ and a ‘fire-pit’ are mentioned, their status remains equivocal, in part because of the paucity of carbonized residues as identified by Lucy Farr in the macrobotanical-analysis section of the report, which itself raises very interesting questions in view of the near total dominance of oak charcoal and the relatively low presence of burnt hazelnut shell. One of the hearths, context 122 in Area 9, with 15 sandstone hearthstones, is described as the ‘best preserved example’ (p.108), but in the absence of any detailed plan, section or photograph of this feature that is difficult to judge. In fact, other than the general view on the front cover, there is a complete absence of site or feature photographs in this report, the only photographs being those of the ‘natural’ in the sections on geology (Chris Green et al.) and OSL dating (Nicholas Branch et al.).
As one would expect with a site of this nature, without any faunal remains, the central chunk of the volume, and a large part of the final discussion, is given over to Nick Marples’s work on the flint artefacts. The published ‘flint report’ is, however, reduced to a short general text accompanied by numerous plots, diagrams and artefact illustrations. Instead, the detailed text, together with the essential tabulated data (for this and other parts of the report), are published separately in a ‘digital supplement;, downloadable via the Surrey Unit website.* Marples provides an admirable analysis of this large lithic collection, but some comments on the presentation are warranted. The eight pages of distribution plots (Figs 5.3-5.18) across the whole site are rather uninformative, and individual, more detailed area plots would have been more useful. The decision to illustrate the artefacts photographically works well with the adze flakes, the large core tools and the refits, but is far less successful with the smaller retouched tools and hopeless for the microliths. The outline microlith drawings used in Fig.5.31 are acceptable, but there should have been more - for example the important Horsham points (only 10 of them) could with benefit all have been illustrated, as could the nine ‘tanged points’(not good terminology) and the 30 inversely retouched points.
The flint report is complemented by a very interesting use-wear study (by Randy Donahue and Adrian Evans). From a sub-sample of 500 artefacts, 158 were examined in detail, of which 48 exhibited use-wear. The latter include 28 microliths, of which 16 were interpreted as armatures, with the remainder having uses for hide cutting (2), hide piercing (2), butchering (7) and hafting (1).
The excavators seem to have appreciated quite early on that they were dealing with a palimpsest situation at North Park Farm where the lithic debris from multi-phase activity (i.e. the ‘persistent place’ of the title) had accumulated. The microlith types suggest Mesolithic people were present - no doubt sporadically - from the Early Mesolithic (plain obliquely blunted point microliths) through to the Late Mesolithic (‘rods’ and ‘tanged points’). Although it was obviously well worth the try, regrettably no definitely homogeneous single-phase scatters were identified. The 25 radiocarbon dates, all on charcoal samples, do not provide a single conclusive date for a particular activity episode or lithic assemblage. In fact the radiocarbon report (Peter Marshall et al.) is in places a little disingenuous and potentially misleading, e.g. ‘Fig.9.1 shows that hearth 161 is early Mesolithic and dates to the second half of the eighth millennium cal BC. This is in agreement with the flint evidence that indicates straight-backed bladelet microlith manufacture taking place in its vicinity’(p.102). This claim is considered more fully and less dogmatically by Marples in the supplement (pp.32–34), but a critical reader might feel that the charcoal fragments no more provide a convincing date for the ‘hearth’and the microliths than do the microliths represent a unitary, indicative tool-kit. Over the course of the many millennia that this location was visited and used by Mesolithic people there will have been many episodes of burning, both anthropogenic and natural, the residues from which would inevitably have become widely dispersed and potentially co-mingled. In fact, one might query whether the cost (£5000? – £10,000?) of these 25 dates and their inconsequential Bayesian analysis, might not have been better spent on publishing the full lithic artefact report, together with more artefact drawings (and in a properly, not ‘perfect’, bound volume).
My judgements are the stuff of hindsight of course, and I do not wish to undervalue the effort and skill involved in bringing this work to publication, for which congratulations are warranted. This is a report for specialists, and all those working on the Mesolithic period in the UK will benefit from it. In terms of how to deal with the challenges of ‘landscape’Mesolithic archaeology, or large flint-scatter sites in general, this report can be seen as an interesting experiment without providing a definitive model.
* Download the PDF supplement. Those wanting to print-out the supplement should be warned that it is 109 pages long.