Managing Lithic Sites

Ploughzone archaeology

It is, or at least it used to be, fairly common to see a row of archaeologists slowly crossing a large ploughed field and stopping occasionally to pick up or mark a find. Fieldwalking has always been an essential element of the archaeological toolkit, offering a minimally intrusive way of providing a broad date for a site discovered by remote sensing, or mapping the manuring scatter around a medieval settlement, for example.

But for earlier prehistory, especially from the Late Upper Palaeolithic to the Early Bronze Age, when people lived largely mobile lives as hunter-gatherers or pastoralists, the ploughzone holds much of the settlement record in the form of scatters of lithic (mainly flint) artefacts. After ploughing, a certain proportion of this material (at least 2%, but often more) will be visible on the surface.

From the 1970s to the 1990s a number of large-scale landscape survey projects based on fieldwalking took place across England: the Fenland Survey, the Kennet Valley Survey, the Stonehenge Environs Project and many others. Recognising this trend, in 1994 English Heritage (as was) initiated the Lithic Scatters Project in order to consolidate knowledge of these sites. One of the key outputs, at the turn of the century, was a guidance document entitled 'Managing Lithic Scatters' (2000).

From scatters to sites: (left) Managing Lithic Scatters (2000); right) Managing Lithic Sites (2024)

However, with the growth of development-led archaeology since the 1990s fieldwork methods evolved and a standardised process emerged, based on geophysical survey and trial-trench evaluation. Fieldwalking did not become a common element of professional practice, in part because the value (financial and archaeological) of ploughsoil data was called into question and in part because changes to farming practice in many areas reduced the window of availability for suitably ploughed and weathered field surfaces.

Old land surfaces

While we may bemoan the lack of attention given to ploughsoil lithic scatters in development-led archaeology, there is another type of site that needs to be considered – that is those scatters which survive within buried soils beneath the reach of the plough, often protected by deposits of colluvium or alluvium.

We may call these ‘lithic sites’ to distinguish them from surface scatters. They represent a resource of considerably greater potential than scatters which are dispersed and damaged by the plough; while perhaps not strictly in situ (soil processes have often caused a degree of vertical movement) they usually retain a great deal of spatial integrity, allowing the elucidation of activity areas and physical refitting of knapping sequences, while individual artefacts are in better condition and therefore suitable for specialist analysis such as use-wear and organic residue.

The problem is that geophysical survey and trial trenching are also a rather poor way of prospecting for and evaluating lithic sites. This kind of site is especially labour-intensive when it comes to excavation, requiring close spatial control through a system of grid squares, 3D-location of all significant artefacts and on-site programmes of wet sieving for debitage (knapping waste). Not picking them up at the evaluation stage is, therefore, problematic. Indeed a number of sites have occurred as unexpected discoveries (or discoveries of unexpected scale) during development-led excavations. Consequently it was decided that the lithic scatters guidance needed updating to include more practical information on in-situ lithic sites.

By focussing primarily on the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods the new guidance, prepared by Oxford Archaeology, complements the recent Curating the Palaeolithic guidance which deals with (primarily) deeply buried archaeology of Pleistocene age. Like that document, it is accompanied by case-studies covering a number of important sites, with a particular focus on methodological approaches taken in the field and in post-excavation.

• One of these case-studies is the remarkable landscape at Stainton West, near Carlisle in Cumbria, where over 300,000 lithics of Mesolithic and Neolithic date were recovered in 2009 from an island between two palaeochannels. The artefacts were associated with hearths, cooking pits, hollows and stakehole structures, discussed in more detail in a recently published monograph report.
• Another is one of those cases where the evaluation failed to predict the scale of the lithic resource: the even larger assemblage (465,000 struck flints) from the Bexhill-Hastings link road in East Sussex, excavated in 2012, though this was distributed over some 260 scatters along a corridor more than 5 kilometres long. Post-excavation work is ongoing though it is already clear that the project will greatly improve understanding of the chronology of the Mesolithic in southern Britain.

Two new monographs

Lithic sites also tell the even older story of the reoccupation of Britain after the last ice age. The new guidance coincides with the publication, supported by Historic England, of the important site at Guildford Fire Station, in the floodplain of the River Wey in Surrey, where excavations in 2013-14 recovered an assemblage of over 15,000 flints dating to the Upper Palaeolithic, around 15,000 years ago. The lithics facilitated extensive refitting, with distinct concentrations indicative of different knappers, one apparently less experienced than the others. Trace-wear analysis of the tools showed that blades were used as hunting projectiles while scrapers were hafted and used for hide-working.

There are parallels not only with the nearby site of Wey Manor Farm, also funded by English Heritage (as was), but with others as far afield as the valleys of the Somme and the Seine, which at this time were not separated from Britain by a sea channel.

We can also look back at the ‘golden age’ of landscape survey projects referred to above, in the form of a forthcoming volume on work undertaken in the Vale of Pickering in North Yorkshire, between 1976 and 2000. This project carried out auger and test-pit survey across a large area of former wetland, as well as excavation of several flint scatters around the shoreline of a palaeo-lake that was also the location of the internationally important Early Mesolithic site of Star Carr, first investigated in the 1950s. Although no sites of equivalent size or status to Star Carr were encountered during the fieldwork, around 45,000 lithics were recovered, which demonstrated the diversity of the evidence for hunter-gatherer activities that has survived in this landscape, spanning the end of the Palaeolithic to the Late Mesolithic.

Moving between scales

If we are currently having a ‘lithics moment’ with the publication, recent or imminent, of a number of key sites, then the revised guidance seems especially timely. The return for the painstaking recovery of thousands of often tiny artefacts, intensive sieving regimes, long hours of refitting knapping sequences and detailed spatial plots is a level of intimacy rarely seen on later, less ephemeral sites, sometimes allowing us to identify the work of different individuals and the places they sat, as well as what particular artefacts were used for.

At the same time we need to remember the different sort of evidence provided by traditional fieldwalking: this is more of a palimpsest of landscape use, a distinctively archaeological contribution to the characterisation of the broader historic landscape, but one that can be tied into different sources of evidence, especially when the scatters are close to wetland locations of palaeoenvironmental potential, such as in the Vale of Pickering or the Kennet valley in Berkshire.

Impact

Further information

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