Kings Manor, home of York Univerisity’s Archaeology Department
For this month’s Dalesman, I visited Dr Nicky Milner, an archaeologist at York University whose work had unearthed tantalising evidence that raises the question of whether there was a stone age settlement near Pickering.
Dr NICKY MILNER WITH 11000 YEAR OLD HARPOON
She’s been working on the archaeology of Star Carr for decades and says, “The more we find, the more questions we bring up. It’s my dream to get back and dig again.”
They have found remains of a house and a waterside ‘platform’ – perhaps a pier, boardwalk, or wharf – towards one corner of a roughly triangular promontory jutting into the lake. Test pits show more human acitivity on the rest of promontory. Might there be more houses there? Was it a base camp, a summer hunting lodge, or even a village?
It’s exciting because current thinking says that at this time, human activity in Yorkshire was limited to small groups of itinerant hunters. But to build a platform requires lots of people to come together, and work together. So this work could revolutionise beliefs about stone age society.
The stone age seems so long ago – but other evidence shows these people to be very like us: discoveries of beads show that they liked to make themselves look good, just as we do today.
Nicky and her colleagues are desperate to discover more – and time is running out. Laboratory work this winter has proved that the valuable organic remains, having survived for 11,000 years, are beginning to decay.
The race is on to dig and find out more before the evidence is lost forever.
Read more about Nicky’s researches in Dalesman, and at www.starcarr.com