Mesolithic Finds Sorting Completed
Added at 18:46 on 25 March 2025
Sorting of wet and dry saved residues from excavations at the Tarradale 2B shell midden was carried out in the winter of 2023 to 2024 and the winter of 2024 to 2025, with the last session held on Sunday, 23 March 2025.
The excavation of the 2B shell midden was undertaken in metre squares and 10 cm spits. About 350 bags of midden material (approximately 4 tonnes) were wet washed, sieved and dried and when dry, sieved again into smaller and larger fractions. The sieved residues were thoroughly examined to extract and bag up pieces of bone, antler, fishbone, lithics, charcoal, land shells, molluscs with holes, and seeds. This has generated a large number of small bags of extracted materials. Included in the materials found at this stage are two cowrie shells that had been pierced to make beads, and a few oyster shells with holes in them, some of which appear to be man-made, but difficult to distinguish from the holes made by animal predation.
Some of the splinters of bone and antler may be broken parts of pins and needles and other tools. The lithics are relatively few, mainly comprising debitage and struck quartz flakes of poor quality. There are a few flint flakes and chunks. The shell residues were bagged up by relevant square and spit, and will be retained for further analysis if required.
The contribution of volunteers to the shell sorting project should be noted by NOSAS. I have calculated that over the two winters of washing, sieving and sorting, volunteers contributed around 1500 hours of labour. At the national minimum wage this would have cost around £17,000. Paying a professional to do this (as preparation for the scientific analysis) would have cost 2 to 3 times that, i.e. potentially up to £50,000 for just the preparatory work. It is interesting to note that the number of hours expended on the shell sorting is roughly equivalent to the number of hours spent on the excavation of the 2B site in 2023. Over the years I’ve been involved in archaeology I have seen the cost of post-excavation analysis increase steadily, and at the present it can cost, in terms of labour input, as much, and frequently more, than the excavation itself. The completion of this huge painstaking input by NOSAS volunteers was marked by a splendid lunch at Tarradale on Sunday, 23 March 2025, complete with shell-decorated cake.
Having reached this important milestone in post-excavation processing of the 2B shell midden, the next task is to quantify the amounts of extracted materials and obtain estimates from appropriate experts about what further information can be extracted from detailed analysis of the extracted bone and antler and charcoal, fishbones, lithics et cetera. The research questions being raised are: what do these environmental remains and artefacts tell us about the way of life of the people who made the 2B shell midden, for example, what food resources were exploited, (terrestrial, estuarine and marine), what use they made of food wastes such as bone and antler and mollusc shells and what environmental conditions can be inferred from the land molluscs and the species of wood represented by the charcoal. It is not anticipated that we will require more radiocarbon dates unless something specific turns up.