The early Mesolithic archaeological site of Star Carr is probably one of the best known sites in England, occupied intermittently for about 300 years, beginning about 10,700 years ago. The site lies within the Vale of Pickering in east Yorkshire in what would have been at the time a swamp fringing a lake. Star Carr was an engineering marvel for its hunter-gatherer inhabitants, the settlement built atop a man-made platform of brush wood, stones and clay, set to stabilize the surface.
Artifacts recovered at Star Carr included over 200 barbed spearpoints, elk antler mattocks, bone scrapers, and masks or headdresses made from red deer antlers. Animals represented in the faunal collections included red deer, roe deer, wild oxen, elk, wild pig, and waterfowl, but a curious lack of fish or molluscan remains, given its location.
Star Carr Excavated
Star Carr was excavated between 1949-1951 by Grahame Clark; Clark's book of the site, Excavations at Star Carr, is considered a classic archaeological text. The original decades of investigation at Star Carr were focused on the remarkable faunal preservation at the site, and what the range of animals were available to hunter-gatherers living there. Additional stable isotope analysis of the faunal remains suggested some interesting patterns of use (or not) of the lake resources.
More recent excavations at the site were begun by Paul Mellars at Cambridge University in the 1990s, and they have been focused on gaining a wider perspective of the settlement of the Malton valley, including sites such as Seamer Carr and Flixton 1.
Since 2003, the universities of Universities of York, Manchester, UCL and Cambridge have jointly excavated at Star Carr, in 2010 announcing the discovery of a house foundation at Star Carr. This house, a circular wooden structure measuring 3.5 meters in diameter, was built no later than 8500 BC and is the oldest house yet discovered in Britain.
Sources
Star Carr's glossary entry is part of the Dictionary of Archaeology and the Guide to European Mesolithic.
See the official Star Carr website at York University for more information.
Clark, J. G. D. 1954. Excavations at Star Carr. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Dark, Petra. 2003. Dogs, a crane (not duck) and diet at Star Carr: a response to Schulting and Richards. Journal of Archaeological Science 50:1353-1356.
Donahue, Randolph E. and William Lovis. 2006. Regional settlement systems in Mesolithic northern England: Scalar issues in mobility and territoriality. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 25:248-258.
Mellars, Paul A. 1990 A major 'plateau' in the radiocarbon time-scale at circa 9650 b.p.: The evidence from Star Carr (Yorkshire). Antiquity 64:836-841.
Wheeler, Alwynne. 1978. Why were there no fish remains at Star Carr. Journal of Archaeological Science 5:85-89
