Farmers arrived in southern England roughly around 4000 B.C., which could mean that they contacted the hunter-gatherers that already lived in the Stonehenge area. The finely-honed dates reveal that Blick Mead was occupied right up until the first elements of the Stonehenge monument were built. But Hudson’s team also used optically stimulated luminescence dating, which can be used to determine when materials were last exposed to sunlight. Previously, researchers had conducted radiocarbon dating on some of the remains at Blick Mead, dating them to a period that lasted from roughly 8000 B.C. Just the same, future analysis aims to target other areas around Stonehenge where the soil might reveal more about the environmental past of the area. It’s hard to know whether this same type of condition prevailed a mile to the west at Stonehenge - the soil there isn’t as suitable for environmental analysis. The diversity of artifacts also reveals that Blick Mead wasn’t necessarily used for any one purpose, like a site specifically used for hunting or tool making. “ seems like a sort of home base where they did everything,” Hudson says. There was also evidence of fish bones likely caught in the nearby river. The presence of so many aurochs bones is an anomaly for the time period: In other Mesolithic remains in the U.K., prey like wild boar or deer are typically more prevalent than aurochs. The clearings at Blick Mead would have presented something unique for hunter-gatherers, Hudson says.īeyond that, the wet grasslands and meadows at Blick Mead would have been perfect for grazing aurochs, which makes sense given the high number of bones scientists have found belonging to the ancient cattle.
Such open environments were rare at the time, as most others areas would have been covered in forest. The predominant pollens they found were from meadow shrubs and other plants. The latter technique is more often used in paleoecology through lake core sampling, but the researchers in this case retrieved plant DNA from archaeological sediments that were thousands of years old.īut the pollen and fungal analysis revealed that the Blick Mead site was likely an open habitat during that era. In a study published recently in PLOS ONE, Hudson and his colleagues conducted analysis of pollen and fungal spores, as well as sedimentary DNA, to try to get a picture of what the ecosystem and environment looked like over 5,000 years ago. The diversity of findings at Blick Mead include everything from the stone flakes created from tool-making to the bones of aurochs - the prehistoric and extinct wild predecessors of cows. The site has revealed roughly 100,000 stone tools, along with bones and other artifacts dating back thousands of years, Hudson says. Researchers have been excavating the archaeological site of Blick Mead, which sits about a mile east of Stonehenge, for about 15 years. “People are exploiting the landscape for different reasons.” Years of Occupation “The late Mesolithic hunter-gatherer environment is a little more dynamic than people would have thought,” he says.
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