Stainton West, Cumbria#
Fraser Brown, Oxford Archaeology#
The excavation of Stainton West in advance of the construction of the Carlisle Northern Development Route, a new bypass built around the west side of Carlisle, revealed a multi-period site perched upon an early Holocene terrace of the River Eden. The fieldwork was undertaken by Oxford Archaeology North in 2009, and a programme of post-excavation analysis has also been undertaken, involving specialists from a wide range of fields and different organisations.
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The excavated site covered 0.6ha, within the footprint of the road, but seems to extend outside this, towards both the north and the south. It comprised a series of palaeochannels, with a dense in situ scatter of struck lithic material (c 300,000 pieces) occurring on an island between two of these. Finds of worked wood and stone within the channels, associated with well-preserved palaeoenvironmental assemblages, indicate various phases of human activity. The earliest of these, dating to the 6th millennium cal BC, probably represents the opportunistic reuse of beaver-made structures by people.
The lithic scatter, on drier land between the channels, was associated with hearths, cooking pits, hollows and stakehole structures, suggesting that a semi-permanent camp or settlement once occupied this area. Scientific dating suggests this site was most likely in use from c 4800 to 4300 cal BC, or slightly thereafter, and, as such, it seems to fall between the phases of activity identified in the channels. Overwhelmingly, the lithic material is characteristic of a narrow-blade, geometric microlithic technology and thus is, in general, consistent with the late Mesolithic date, although other types, such as leaf-shaped points and polished stone pieces, which are usually considered to be later, were also recovered. One possible conclusion is that the site is transitional, encompassing the Mesolithic–Neolithic continuum. The raw materials represented had been sourced from an exceedingly large catchment area, including beach pebble flint from western Cumbria, good-quality flint probably of eastern Yorkshire origin, Lake District tuff, Arran pitchstone, quartz, ochre and a variety of cherts, including those that can be sourced locally and materials that most probably derived from both the Pennines and from the southern Scottish uplands.
A range of innovative techniques were successfully employed during the course of the Stainton West investigation and the results, including the raw data, will ultimately be made available on-line, in an indexed digital format. In order to retrieve the huge, in situ lithic assemblage, in a way that preserved its spatial integrity, a wet sieving methodology was imported from the Netherlands. The site was divided into 886 1m² grid squares, and the sediment from these was whole-earth sampled by context. Approximately 270,000 litres of clay-rich sediment was then wet sieved on site to 2mm, employing water pumped from the palaeochannel excavations. This was a very gentle process that has successfully preserved the microglosses on the lithic fabric, enabling their study.