Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

Star Carr: Life After the Ice

Professor Nicky Milner, Department of Archaeology, University of York

This talk is the first in a series to accompany the Star Carr exhibition in the Yorkshire Museum. The Mesolithic site of Star Carr was found near Scarborough in North Yorkshire and is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world! It has revealed Britain’s earliest known house, the oldest carpentry in Europe and the oldest complete bow in the world. In this lecture, find out more about how the discovery was made, and the history of investigations and get a sense of what life might have been like 11,000 years ago!

7pm in the Tempest Anderson Lecture Theatre in the Yorkshire Museum on Wednesday 11th September.

Exhibition website:

https://www.yorkshiremuseum.org.uk/exhibition/star-carr-life-after-the-ice/

Member’s report

Professor Nicky Milner gave a very well-illustrated and highly engaging talk entitled ‘Star Carr: Life in Yorkshire 10,000 year ago’. She started by paying tribute to Yorkshire Museum staff with whom she had worked collaboratively in co-curating the current exhibition. Her interest in Star Carr goes back a long way from working at the site since 2004 and having been a member of the Vale of Pickering Research project since the 1990s. It was, however, Andrew Morrison, formerly Curator of Archaeology, who had first mentioned the idea of a Star Carr exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum and there had been a number of small displays in galleries featuring the famous headdress and more recently the Star Carr pendant, despite which the site was virtually unknown to local people.

Professor Milner grew up only 5 miles away from the site and first heard of it as a 16 year old schoolgirl when she worked with Dominic Powlesland at the West Heslerton Project during casual after work discussions with diggers but it was not until she was an undergraduate student at Cambridge University that she learnt about Star Carr and subsequently spent much of her career working to make the site better known and understood.

Professor Milner’s talk was a detailed and accessible introduction to the site of Star Carr and the new Yorkshire Museum display which aims to present a picture of what life was like for Mesolithic people living in the area based on evidence recovered by archaeological excavation. Star Carr is a lowland relatively flat site near Scarborough. Today the fields and drainage ditches are similar to many other low-lying areas and there is nothing to indicate that this is an internationally important prehistoric site. Geological investigations have conclusively demonstrated that this area was in a shallow lake in the past.

We heard about the discovery of the site by Scarborough based John Moore, a founding member of the Scarborough Archaeological and Historical Society in the late 1940s. He discovered the area was a lake with small islands and found 9 sites including Star Carr and realised it was very rich in Mesolithic artefacts. Moore contacted Cambridge based Graham Clark who had looked at prehistoric stone tools from the UK and mainland Europe. By this time the Mesolithic period was already recognised as a period characterized by distinctive tool technology and Clark became very excited as he saw similarities between the finds at Star Carr and those of several sites in Denmark. Unlike many Mesolithic sites, Star Carr produced finds made of wood, antler and bone, and not just stone objects. Clark was also aware of the important work on peat cores carried out by pollen experts at Cambridge and arranged for pollen samples to be analysed. He carried out three seasons of excavations and discovered the first birch wood platform with timbers bearing axe marks. He also discovered beads made from shale and amber. In addition he recovered 21 very rare antler headdresses made from red deer skulls only found in 5 other sites in Germany.  These require huge amounts of work to carve them and are extremely rare, exciting and important.

The lecture concluded with a report on the recent excavations led by the Department of Archaeology at the University of York.

Andrew K G Jones