Photo of the comedian Norman Maclean taken from The Urban Clansman, the blog of the Galgael Trust

From the Guardian -

Its freshly oiled pine hull is as fragrant as a wet winter woodland. Modelled on a thousand-year-old prototype, this hulking birlinn – a Gaelic longboat – will soon be ready to sail out along the Clyde and up the west coast in homage to the time when water was Scotland’s main thoroughfare. It is taking form in an old iron foundry in Glasgow’s Govan, home to a uniquely imaginative community project called the GalGael Trust.

Here, local volunteers teach carpentry, saw-milling and metalwork, as well as boat-building and sailing – the skills so valued in the once thriving shipyards that secured for this area its reputation as the workshop of the empire. It was the inexorable decline in demand for such skills that gifted Govan the reality it contends with today: paralysing levels of unemployment, chronic alcohol and drug addiction, and habitual violence on the streets. The fractured life stories of the men who come here to learn bear witness to all this.

The GalGael philosophy addresses what many an academic study has theorised: that deprivation has psychic as well as economic consequences; that social exclusion is ameliorated as much by a sense of place and heritage as it is by targeted benefits and instrumental interventions; and that hope flourishes in the most unlikely soil. Crucially, given Govan’s history, it recognises that the future is informed by the past.

Perched on a high-backed chair as expertly rendered as anything you’d find in Heal’s, Jinksy tells of 10 lost years sitting in the house, “becoming a vegetable”, after he was laid off as a council roadsweeper. Then a pal told him about the GalGael. “I’d lost trust in people, but there’s a family feeling here. I’ve always been an outside person and this brings you back to the land. It gives you an idea of place.” Over the years, the GalGael has helped hundreds like him to regain confidence in their working abilities, relationships and community.

Gehan, who set up the trust in the mid-90s with her late partner, explains how the act of building and sailing a boat in the same way that one’s ancestors did offers an immediate connectedness that is different from academically acquired history. The fact is that many city-dwelling Scots are only three or four generations removed from rural living, and connection to the land looms large in the national psyche. Many descendants of the half-million Highlanders driven off their crofts to make way for sheep-farming now live in poverty in Glasgow. While the Scottish land reform movement has scored recent successes with community buyouts like those on the isles of Eigg and Gigha, the GalGael is restoring an area of derelict farmland in Argyll.

It is thus entirely appropriate that some of the men working here have recently enjoyed a foray into acting, as extras in a television series on Scottish history. The History of Scotland, which concluded last Sunday on BBC Scotland, proved controversial, with many senior academics lamenting its broad strokes and glaring omissions. This reaction was perhaps inevitable, given the startling lack of popular treatment of Scottish history, as well as the legacy of poor and piecemeal teaching of the national heritage in schools. For many Scots, knowledge of their history begins and ends with William Wallace – and Mel Gibson’sBraveheart version of the man at that.

The 10-part series, fronted by the archaeologist Neil Oliver, was a watchable introduction, and avoided the usual shortbread-and-saltires mythologising, even tackling the country’s role in the slave trade. But it remains to be seen if this will serve to kick-start public examination of Scotland’s political, social and cultural past, or be seen as the history box ticked for another decade. It’s worth noting that on the same network Andrew Marr has been offering an examination of just the first few decades of British 20th-century history with the same amount of airtime that Oliver had.

Homecoming, a year-long festival celebrating the Scottish diaspora that concluded on St Andrew’s Day, prompted further examination of the national self-image with the news that the centrepiece Clan Gatheringevent in Edinburgh, which attracted claymore obsessives from across the globe, had made a £600,000 loss. Those clan chiefs, so beloved of our ancestry-minded American and Canadian cousins, continue to draw resentment over their collusion in the Highland clearances.

An organisation like the GalGael is local by intention, a bespoke vision that is constantly retuned and refreshed by its participants, rather than a one-size-fits-all template imposed from Holyrood or a charitable behemoth in London. To recognise its worth is not to submit to David Cameron’s big society rhetoric, but to see how small-scale originals like this one can only succeed alongside centrally governed support structures.

If it can teach us something nationally it is that, in understanding our past, we must face the faultlines of Highland or lowland, Catholic or Protestant, nationalist or unionist that have come to define the nation, though not always the people within it. And particularly at a moment when independence is once again top of the political agenda.

Moreover, if a sense of history is about a grasp of narrative and one’s place in it, this can only assist us in imagining the future. Last year theGlasgow 2020 project, funded by Demos, found that inhabitants of some of the most deprived areas continued to tell stories of optimism for the future of their families, friends and neighbourhoods. The true legacy of history can be hope.

From YouTube -

From the Galgael website -

Folk without an enriched sense of their culture are like trees with shallow roots… To our minds, this analogy describes the loss of identity and sense of meaningless that creates vulnerability to the vagaries of the worst excesses of modern life. A situation steadily worsened by the consistent undermining of the bonds of community.

Agencies picking up the pieces and the tab for tackling the symptoms of this rootlessness are essential. But beyond this – what is called for is nothing less than to reconvene a sense of ‘peoplehood’; deep roots for an identity that builds resilience, embodies shared values, and in the same breath, transcends narrow forms of nationalism.

The very name GalGael is our way of re-rooting these notions of identity in nourishing ground and recognises that there is both a bit of the stranger and a bit of the native in us all. In history, Gal Gaidheal were a 9thC people; the Gal – the ‘strange or foreign’ Norse, embraced by the Gael – the ‘heartland people’.

As a modern day people, GalGael folk have been re-visioning inclusive forms of community that build on our interdependence rather than slip into dependency culture, and that explore our collective responsibilities, not just our rights. From this stand point, we are reweaving the fabric of our families and communities, experimenting with notions of clanship, extended family and kinship.

Scottish history from Scottishweb -

Scotland’s history is dotted with battles and skirmishes around these fortifications, some of which have had a massive impact on the future of Scotland as a nation. There is one place however that stands out as a landmark both in its physical appearance and on the pages of Scottish history: Dunadd hill fort in Argyll, Scotland.

Dunadd could be regarded as the crowning place for the original Kings of Scotland. This fist of stone on the edge of Crinan Moss in Argyll, near the village of Lochgilphead, is believed to be the “capital” of the ancient kingdom of Dalriada. It makes for a perfect defensive position, prominating from a flat moss all around. The sides of the hill are terraced in such a fashion as to protect the small fort on the top.

It was built around 500AD at a time when Fergus MacErc and two of his brothers led a Scottish invasion from Ireland and established their kingdom of Dalriada with Dunadd as its seat. In climbing the hill its easy to appreciate how well defended it is. Several obstacles must be surmounted before reaching the top, which at the time was a solid built stone fortification.

On the slope near to the summit there are rocks containing what appear to be a carved out human footprint and a stone basin. There is also a slab of stone with a carved wild boar on it, as well as an inscription in Ogam writing. Its said that the would be king would place his foot in this stone ‘footprint’ during the crowning ceremony. This ritual was certainly a large influence on the Lords of the Isles, who based their ceremonial inaugurations on the said rituals at Dunadd.

Many items have been found in the three times the site has been officially excavated. Items such as beautiful broaches, quern stones and fine examples of metal working all tie in with the theory about Dunadd being the seat of the King.

However – to the north was still the kingdom of the Picts. Many years of Viking battering on the Pictish nation had taken its toll, and by 843 with Dunadd being an established political centre, Kenneth MacAlpin, the king of the Scots based at Dunadd, attacked the Picts in an attempt to gain rule over the Pictish kingdom.

He enjoyed success in his efforts and united the two kingdoms under his rule, thus becoming the first true king of all Scotland. As in the Huntingdon Chronicle – ” And so he was the first of the Scots to obtain the monarchy of the whole of Alba, which is now called Scotia “

Dunadd is an enchanting place and it is still easy to imagine the small hill teaming with people and life. It must have been a busy place in its day, and the remains of the work endured by its inhabitants remains there for us to see over a thousand years later.

The whole Kilmartin area is fascinating and littered with prehistoric and historic monuments. From castles and standing stones to brochs and burial sites, one could spend many days in the same area.

Scotland was born here -

From wikipedia -

Dunadd Hill Fort

Dunadd, ‘fort on the [River] Add’, is an Iron Age and later hillfort near Kilmartin in Argyll and Bute, Scotland, a little north of Lochgilphead (NR 836 936). At one time an island, it now lies inland near the River Add. The surrounding land, now largely reclaimed, was formerly boggy and known as the Mòine Mhòr ‘Great Moss’ in Gaelic. This no doubt increased the defensive potential of the site.

Originally occupied in the Iron Age, the site later became a seat of the kings of Dál Riata. It is known for its unique stone carvings below the upper enclosure, including a footprint and basin thought to have formed part of Dál Riata‘s coronation ritual. Though it is an assumption only and not attested in contemporary written sources, similarly as the legend saying that Dunadd was the first location of Stone of Scone in Scotland. On the same flat outcrop of rock is an incised boar in Pictish style, and in inscription in the ogham script. The inscription is read as referring to a Finn Manach and is dated to the late 8th century or after.

Dunadd is mentioned twice in early sources. In 683 the Annals of Ulster record: ‘The siege of Dunadd and the siege of Dundurn [a hillfort near Loch Earn]‘ without further comment on the outcome or participants. In the same chronicle the entry for 736 states: ‘Óengus son of Fergus, king of the Picts, laid waste the territory of Dál Riata and seized Dunadd, and burned Creic [location unknown] and bound in chains two sons of Selbach king of Dál Riata], i.e. Dúngal and Feredach . .’.

The site was occupied after 736, at least into the 9th century. It is mentioned twice in later sources, suggesting that it retained some importance. In 1436, it is recorded that “Alan son of John Riabhach MacLachlan of Dunadd” was made seneschal of the lands of Glassary; the chief place of residence of the MacLachlans of Dunadd lay below the fort. In June 1506, commissioners appointed by James IV, including the earl and bishop of Argyll, met at Dunadd to collect rents and resolve feuds.

The site is an Ancient Monument, under the care of Historic Scotland, and is open to the public (open all year; no entrance charge).

Because Dunadd is mentioned in early sources, and is readily identifiable, it has been excavated on several occasions (1904-05, 1929, 1980) and has one of the most important ensembles of finds from any early medieval site in Scotland. These include tools, weapons, quernstones, imported pottery and motif-pieces and moulds for the manufacture of fine metalwork (especially jewellery).

From About.com, by K. Kris Hurst -

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.

From the Times Higher Education (published 2000) -

One of the seats of Stone-Age civilisation in the British Isles has just become even older. Experts have been able to date the settlement of Star Carr, where the first evidence of wood-working and possible animal husbandry has been discovered, with unprecedented precision.

It emerges that the inhabitants of Star Carr, in the Vale of Pickering, Yorkshire, lived in a lakeside settlement dating back 10,970 years, just 600 years after the ice sheets retreated following the abrupt end of the last Ice Age.

Petra Dark, an archaeologist at Reading University, said: “It is even older than we thought and for the first time for any Mesolithic site, we now know the exact length of the interval between the occupation and climate warming.”

In a forthcoming paper in the journal Antiquity, Dr Dark said that a new assessment of tree-ring data in Germany had added 200 years to the age of the site.

Excavations at Star Carr over the past two decades have revealed evidence that nearby reedbeds were annually burned, implying a deliberate management policy that may have been intended to entice animals to the lakeside where they could be easily hunted.

Evidence of a plank-built jetty was found, representing perhaps the first use of such sophisticated woodwork in the British Isles.

From Wikipedia -

Star Carr is a Mesolithic archaeological site in North Yorkshire, England. It is around five miles south of Scarborough (grid reference TA02798100).^[1]

It belongs to the early Mesolithic Maglemosian culture, evidence for which is present across the lowlands of Northern Europe, and is a Maglemosian type site.^[1] It was occupied from around 8770 BC until about 8460 BC, possibly with a period of abandonment between 8680 BC and 8580 BC.^[2] It was discovered in 1947 during the clearing of a field drain.

Star Carr’s main feature is a birch brushwood platform which stood on the edge of former Lake Pickering.^[3] The platform would have been laid down to consolidate the boggy water’s edge.

Hearths found further away from the water indicate temporary settlement. It was visited seasonally by Mesolithic hunters chasing red and roe deer, elk, aurochs and wild boar.^[2] The original analysis of the animal bones led to the suggestion that the site was occupied during the winter season. New work has proved this to be wrong, and has shown that hunters visited the site in early summer, to take immature deer that had lost maternal care. A few visits may have been made later in the summer^[4].

The mud of the lake has preserved items dropped into it and the hunter’s tools such as flint scrapers used to clean animal skins and worked bone and antler have been found. The most striking examples are 21 perforated part skull and antlers of red deer.

A fragment of a wooden oar implies that the people who occupied the site also built boats, probably coracles or simple canoes used to travel or fish. Beads made from stone and amber suggest personal adornment. Remains of a dog are indication of the animal’s domestication during this period.

The flint came from the Yorkshire Wolds further south. A type of axe, new to Britain, was made from it at Star Carr. It was sharpened during its life by simple transverse blows which made it more adaptable.

The most famous find is the top part of a stag skull, complete with antlers. The skull had two holes perforated in it and it has been suggested that it was used as a hunting disguise, or in some form of ritual or story-telling..

Excavations at Star Carr are currently being undertaken by a team from the University of Manchester, led by leading expert Dr. Chantal Conneller. During August 2008 extensive excavations will be undertaken, extending the trenches dug by Grahame Clark, who remains an authority on the site.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} “Star Carr“. Pastscape.org.uk. Retrieved on 2008-01-15.
2. ^ ^{a b} Scarre (2005), p. 397.
3. ^ Scarre (2005), p. 396.
4. ^ Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988

Bibliography

• Scarre, Chris (ed) (2005). The Human Past: World Prehistory & the Development of Human Societies, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-28531-4.
• Legge, Anthony J.; Peter Rowley-Conwy (1988). Star Carr Revisited; a Re-analysis of the Large Mammals, Birkbeck College. ISBN 0-7187-0876-8.

From British Archaeology -

Fading Star

Star Carr is one of the truly great sites of ancient Britain. It has been revisited by archaeologists (the then young editor among them) more than any other excavation. So how is it that in five years it may be gone? Nicky Milner – deep in her own revisitation – explains.

Star Carr, near Scarborough, North Yorkshire has captured the imaginations of archaeologists since the first significant excavations in 1949–51. In the 1940s the British mesolithic (then thought to have lasted 3,000 years, now dated to 10–4,000BC) barely registered in prehistoric narratives. Grahame Clark, however, realised the importance of hunter-gatherers in European prehistory. He hoped the promise of organic remains likely to be preserved in the wet peat at Star Carr would add a new dimension to an era represented by little more than a few enigmatic flint artefacts.

It did. In fact the range and quantity of finds, including red deer skull frontlets turned into headdresses, and antler points made for spears or harpoons along with manufacturing blanks and raw antlers, remain outstanding in Europe. Star Carr has been described as a “type site”. It never fails to appear in text book accounts of the mesolithic. It has had a huge number of research articles written about it, it is constantly being reinterpreted and further excavations were undertaken in the 1980s by the Vale of Pickering Research Trust.

So, why carry out more excavations there?! Well, despite all these years of research there are still many important unanswered questions about Star Carr. And now we have discovered that the site is under serious threat and may soon be lost forever.

Over the last 20 years or so the Vale of Pickering Trust has been working hard to picture the ancient landscape. Today the area is farmland, but some 11–12,000 years ago Star Carr would have been on the edge of a lake. The lake turned to peat through prehistory, but augering and measuring the peat’s depth have revealed the mesolithic land surface and lake edges. Test pits dug around much of the lake edge have also discovered a number of other early mesolithic sites.

What this work has shown is that Star Carr is not a “type site” within this landscape: it is unique. None of the other early mesolithic sites has the same kind of artefact assemblage. At Star Carr 192 barbed antler and bone points have been found (which is over 97% of the total number found in Britain!). Only one other broken barbed point has been found on the lake, at No Name Hill. The antler mattocks, stone axes and beads made of shale, animal teeth and amber found at Star Carr have also not been found on the other sites around the lake. As if that was not enough, Clark’s antler headdresses find parallels on only three sites on the continent, each with one example. Star Carr has 21.

This work around the lake has allowed new interpretations to be put forward. For instance, Richard Chatterton, Joshua Pollard, Chantal Conneller and Tim Schadla-Hall have all considered the unusual range and quantity of material culture at Star Carr, and have suggested that these objects may have been the focus of ritual deposition into the open water. They also identify the social significance mesolithic people attributed to animals, particularly in this context red deer, as the motivation behind the unusual depositionary practices. Yet technological analysis highlights the range of activities at Star Carr and the network of connections with other sites in the area. These authors have not tried to replace the other functional interpretations, such as butchery site or hunting base camp, with “ritual site”.

New questions

The original excavations and the monograph have been heralded as being of a high standard for their time, but there are certain questions which have been thrown up by the new interpretations which cannot be answered with present data.

Environmental investigations were carried out during the original excavations, but they did not provide detailed information on the archaeological contexts. Through the work in the 1980s it is now thought that much of the area excavated by Clark may have been open water at the time of occupation. This also raises questions about the brushwood, which Clark interpreted as a living platform. It is now believed it lay beneath the artefact layers and was perhaps a natural wood accumulation. The site stratigraphy is far from clear because there are very few section drawings.

Another area of intrigue is the wooden platform found during palaeoenvironmental investigations in the 1980s. This platform, unlike the brushwood one, shows clear evidence of working, and according to ancient wood specialist Maisie Taylor is the earliest evidence for carpentry in Europe. To date we know very little about it, how it relates to the archaeology found in Clark’s trenches, its extent and where it leads to.

Another major question is “how big was Star Carr?”. There seems to be a general impression that Clark’s excavations encompassed most, if not the whole of the site, but it now seems that he uncovered only some of the lake edge deposits. The fieldwork carried out in the 1980s suggested that the site was larger and there was a dry land element.

Another important issue is the timing of activities. From the distribution and typology of barbed points, Clark suggested there were two phases of occupation; he estimated that Star Carr was used over 25 years. Work in the 1980s by Petra Dark on pollen and burning of reed swamp has suggested that the site has a much longer history and that it was probably occupied, intermittently, over about 230 years.

New work

Three years ago, we revisited Star Carr again and fieldwalked it. What was immediately apparent was that the land had been affected by peat drainage. What had in the past appeared as a totally flat field (seen in some of the earlier fieldwork photographs), now rises and falls. What would have been dry land on the lake edge in the mesolithic stands proud of what would have been the lake, and we estimate that the peat has shrunk in some places by several metres.

The fieldwalking provided some interesting data. A peninsula to the east of the original excavations produced large quantities of flint, and some test pitting suggested that plough damage was occurring. The following year we excavated a line of test pits down the peninsula. This revealed substantial concentrations of knapped flint, in some areas up to 139 pieces per square metre. This suggests that the original excavated area constitutes less than 5% of the total occupation!

Fieldwork continued last summer, when we excavated two larger trenches to determine whether the archaeology continued in the lake margins to the east of the earlier excavations. We also wished to elucidate the stratigraphy of the sediments, and observe the effect of drainage and the state of peat.

Trench 21 was fairly shallow, and produced flint but no organic material. Trench 22, however, was much more like both Clark’s trenches and the 1980s excavations. It contained considerable quantities of wood. Maisie Taylor suggests this represents a natural accumulation of brushwood, similar to that discovered by Clark. However she also found several distinctive triangular chips which are a characteristic of mesolithic woodworking. This activity may have been connected with the manufacture of the timber platform discovered in the 1980s, which lies only 12m to the west of this trench.

We also found several pieces of antler, one of which has clearly been worked: a strip has been removed to make a barbed point. What is more, burins and other flint tools were found beside it. These finds show that activities occurred further around the lake edge than had been previously thought; there may be other concentrations of activities elsewhere still to be explored. The antler has now been dated to roughly 8700BC, which falls towards the end of the period of occupation and coincides with Petra Dark’s later phase of reed swamp burning, demonstrating a long tradition of antler working at the site.

What was really shocking, however, was the state of the antler. It had lost almost all of its mineral content and was flattened in section, unlike the solid antler found in Clark’s excavations. Specialists who visited the site and saw this, along with the state of the peat and the wood, suggested that any antler, bone and wood that still survives will probably disappear within the next five to 10 years. Research at York University by Matthew Collins and his team is showing that bone can rapidly decay in a mere couple of years if contained in peat where the water table fluctuates seasonally. It is possible that this may be happening in some areas of the Star Carr site.

The future of Star Carr

The arguments for further work at the site could not be clearer. Less than 5% of the site has been excavated and there is still much to learn:
• What was the nature of the dry land area? Were there structures, hearths and other activities? What does the flint distribution tell us? How far does this occupation area extend? Could this represent large group gatherings?
• What was the nature of the lake edge deposits? What exactly was the context of deposition – were objects being placed in open water or reed swamp? How did the hydrology of the lake work – were some areas seasonally flooded? Where did the timber platform lead and why was it constructed? Why is the accumulation of brushwood there? How far does it stretch? What is the distribution of lake edge activities such as antler working? Why were artefacts being deposited at the lake edge?
• How can we understand the temporality of activities at the site? Did they change over time?
• Why is this site so different to other sites around the lake? Why have other sites like this not been found in Britain? How does this site compare to other sites on the continent?

Our plans are to continue excavating. This year we hope to investigate a larger area of the original dry land to look for evidence of occupation and activities, and to assess the extent of the plough damage. We also intend to excavate nearer to Clark’s trenches at the lake margins, to further investigate the deposition of bone and antler, to monitor the degradation of the peat and the conditions for organic survival, and to examine the stratigraphy and nature of the lake edge deposits and the brushwood accumulation in more detail. We are lucky to be collaborating with a wide range of specialists who are providing support and expertise on subjects that include wood, pollen, sediments, macro-plant remains, insect remains and conservation.

But time is running out. Although Star Carr has been studied for over 50 years, we may have less than five years before much of the waterlogged remains deteriorate completely.

There have been criticisms by some that Star Carr has not just informed, but also prejudiced and biased our understanding of mesolithic Britain, and that perhaps this site has been studied too much already at the expense of other sites.

It is certainly true that Star Carr has dominated our narratives of the period. But these have drawn on a very small area of the site, creating a biased understanding. It is important that we try to understand much more in order to correct previous misapprehensions. It is also important that Star Carr is not seen as a “type site”, but is acknowledged as having a unique character, at least within the Lake Flixton landscape.

We aim within the next five years to rescue much of the remaining archaeology and address many of the new research questions that have been posed. And we hope that the site will continue to stimulate interest and debate for generations of archaeologists to come.

The new excavations are a joint project between the Universities of York, Manchester, UCL and Cambridge supported by the Vale of Pickering Research Trust, the British Academy and the McDonald Institute, Cambridge. See www.york.ac.uk/depts/arch/Projects/StarCarrWebsite/index.htm. Nicky Milner directs a new MA in mesolithic studies at the University of York.