WIRRAL TIME TRAVEL
BY ANDREW WOOD
MESOLITHIC WIRRAL WAS NO LEISURE PENINSULA
The Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, period of human development occurred at the end of the last Ice Age over 10,000 years ago. It began at the end of the Palaeolithic period and then evolved into the Neolithic period when man began to domesticate plants and animals, and as a result developed from being a hunter-gatherer to living in settled communities.
Until very recently, archaeologists believed that Mesolithic people roamed the forested countryside in small groups, hunting animals and gathering edible plants, roots, nuts and fruit in tune with the seasons. This bucolic image was based primarily on studies of modern peoples who still forage and hunt as a way of life. The latest research, however, casts doubt on this view. Far from having a fairly relaxed way of life, in which they had easy pickings, it seems that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to work hard for their living. Wirral was no‘ leisure peninsula’ in that period of history!
The landscape of Mesolithic Wirral, and of England as a whole, was wooded. It developed, by about 7,500 years ago, from fairly open woods of pine, birch and hazel into a denser forest of oak, elm, lime and ash. Where trees died, fell and decayed, small glades encouraged the growth of edible plants including blackberries, barberries, sloes, crab-apples, haws and hazelnuts. Weeds like fat hen, knotgrass, knaw, corn spurry and chickweed could also be eaten. Mammals included deer and auroch( wild cattle, now extinct), elk, wild boar, badgers, hedgehogs, various wild cats and smaller mammals like shrews. The Dee, the Mersey and the sea offered a rich and varied diet from fish to molluscs. Dogs, used for hunting, were the only domesticated animals. There is evidence that Mesolithic groups periodically burned some woodland deliberately to create clearings, probably to provide‘ killing grounds’ for animals rather than to sow edible plants.
In the south, the English Channel was not formed until about 6500 BCE. For 2,000 years before that, the main routes for people moving from the Eurasian landmass were in the east and south of England. These immigrants were all hunter-gatherers following a nomadic lifestyle.
Traditionally, the story of early Britain has been understood as waves of invaders displacing or annihilating the previous inhabitants. Archaeology, however, suggests that this is fundamentally mistaken. For more than 10,000 years people have moved into – and out of – Britain, sometimes in large numbers, sometimes in small groups, but there has always been a basic continuity of population. The earliest human settlement yet found on Merseyside was located in fields at Greasby. It dates from approximately 7000 BCE and was excavated, between 1987 and 1990, by archaeologists from National Museums on Merseyside. The site was discovered by fieldwalking: prehistoric sites can be identified when worked flint tools and pottery are brought to the surface by modern deep ploughing. These are the most frequently found and reliable indicators, because stone tools are very durable and so more likely to survive.
The Greasby site has provided evidence of the mobility of the family, or several families of hunter-gatherers who once lived there. The principal evidence is that nearly all of the stone tools are made of chert, the nearest source of which is in North Wales. It is likely that these people spent part of the year in North Wales. The sea-level at that time was much lower than it is today, so it would have been easier for them to cross the River Dee.
Like flint, chert is a silicate, made up of silicon and oxygen. Both flint and chert are aggregates of microscopic crystals of quartz, found in calcareous sedimentary rocks. Chert, however, is inferior to flint for knapping. It was rarely used for making cutting tools, though flake knives are found occasionally. Large pieces of chert were often used instead of flint to form scrapers and piercing tools. It was frequently used – as it was at Greasby – as an alternative to flint for microliths( arrowheads). In the British Isles, flint occurs in chalk, and chert occurs in carboniferous limestone. The area nearest to Greasby from which chert can be obtained is the band of carboniferous limestone that lies immediately south of the millstone grit hills which run parallel to the River Dee on the Welsh side.
What the archaeologists discovered at Greasby was a hearth or fireplace, and a number of pits, which may initially have been used for storing food but had later been filled with rubbish. Some burnt hazelnuts were found in the vicinity of the hearth. At the bottom of one pit, hidden under a layer of pebbles, they found a collection of roughly shaped pieces of flint, ready to be worked into arrowheads. There were various stone tools that could have been used for preparing food, working bone or wood, or for hunting. A small area in which flakes of flint were found was probably where a specialist flint knapper made spear- and arrowheads for hunting and scrapers for removing hair and skin from prey. The group’ s shelters would probably have resembled‘ benders’ made of animal skins stretched over a framework of pliable branches. All the evidence suggested that
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