Landscapes, Lithics, and Identity: a critical evaluation of the early Mesolithic sites in the Kennet Valley, Berkshire#
Ray Nilson#
(University of Manchester)#
The first portion of my research focuses on the early Mesolithic of the Kennet Valley in Berkshire. Using a strong lithic analysis, I attempt to illustrate the importance of landscape revelation through social processes and practices involved in the technology, deposition, and utilisation of flint artefacts during the early Mesolithic period. I reject the notion that early Mesolithic landscapes are vast terrestrial expanses with ambiguous borders, but are instead multiple in number and take presence at each site in their own right. Moreover, I wish to counter such claims that the most common residues of early Mesolithic societies (lithic assemblages) determine the primary function of Mesolithic sites and contest if they ever had a chief purpose at any time. I find that approaches to lithic evidence through ad hoc assumptions frequently results in signposting places and locales within strict inert interpretative frameworks. I argue that Mesolithic humans understood place and locale as landscapes embedded in social practices and processes that were embroiled with lithic activities. Process and practice additionally provide the criteria for generating identities of early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, places, and locales. As a result, it is subsequently suggested that the fluid revelations of human identities and landscape identities were perpetually and mutually constituted.
The second portion of my thesis deals with movement and sensory engagement with the environment. I postulate that hunter-gatherer movement through the world was not a definitively structured enterprise but was instead achieved through wayfinding and sensory experience. Here, it is argued that hunter-gatherers seldom engaged in modern western Cartesian philosophies that advocate for control and dominance over nature. By this, environmental exploitation is not viewed as the sole determinant which dictated hunter-gatherer movement. As a result, it is proposed that the Kennet Valley hunter-gatherers developed detailed knowledge and negotiated complex relationships with the environment and its constituents, through perpetual sensory engagements within their world; as part of it. Such knowledge expanded over the generations consistently adding to elaborate historicities of humans and their environment. Moreover, I suggest that mobility in the early Mesolithic of the Kennet Valley was not a predictable and ordered seasonal phenomenon where communities embarked on long-distance journeys. The numerous Kennet Valley Mesolithic sites are in close proximity to each other, some no more than one hundred metres away. Therefore, I propose that mobility within the Kennet was unpredictable, where hunter-gatherers travelled on many occasions over short distances to randomly situated places through wayfinding.