Britain Inside and Outside Mesolithic Europe

Abstract

It is now some twenty years since Clark wrote his paper ‘A Microlithic Industry from the Cambridgeshire Fenland and other industries of Sauveterrian affinities from Britain’ (Clark 1955), and almost as long since he considered the cultural and chronological implications of flint industries with Trapezes—bitruncated blades—in North Western Europe (Clark 1958). Since then some 150 to 200 radiocarbon determinations have become available for the Mesolithic of this area—most particularly from Denmark, the Netherlands and Britain, with rather fewer from France. It is, quite deliberately, not the intention of this paper to attempt a detailed consideration, or presentation of all these new dates—not even for Britain where some sixty recent determinations and their associations will be the subject of a separate larger paper (Switsur and Jacobi, in preparation). More worrying, however, than this mass of new datings is a proliferation of new and mainly regional terms for stone industries, which, while believed to show sufficient diversity to demand such an extended nomenclature, are nevertheless obviously closely linked at the techno-complex level. It is then at this techno-complex level at which it is intended to work, and it is towards a simplified, or at least manageable, terminology that it is proposed to aim. The Key to the article will remain Britain in relation to the European mainland.