The way through the woods: hunters
and grazers
For thousands of years the landscape
around Greenhead Moss was very varied and rich in
resources. This included hazelnuts, different fungi
and many other plant foods that we don’t think
of eating now – would you recognise bog bean or
think of eating the base of reed stems?
The pollen evidence only tells us about
plants, but there was also a variety of other life
– from microscopic bacteria, to insects and
larger herbivores which are still familiar, like red
deer and foxes. But at this time in Scotland there
were also other animals which have been extinct for
between thousands and hundreds of years, animals like
brown bears, moose, giant wild cattle called aurochs,
lynxes and wolves and beavers.
Wild animals that once roamed
Scotland:
www.kincraig.com/wildlife/default.htm
We know from archaeological evidence,
like stone tools and camp sites, that people were
also around in many parts of the country, including
central Scotland. They relied on hunting and
gathering wild plants and animals, using tools made
of stone, wood and bone. This is why they are often
called hunter-gatherers, or Mesolithic people:
‘lithic’ means ‘stone’.
Archaeologists call the time period between around
10000 and 5000 years ago the ‘Mesolithic’.
Farming and metals were unknown in Britain then.
See what a Mesolithic hunting
camp may have looked like www.archaeolink.co.uk/home.htm
Scotland’s First Settlers
www.moray.ac.uk/ccs/settlers.htm
To harvest the best wild resources
Mesolithic people had to be able to move to different
places at different times of the year and so they
often didn’t leave much evidence of where and
how they lived. This is why it is difficult to
‘see’ them in pollen diagrams. They were
using nature’s resources, so maybe they did not
need to disturb the vegetation much, a lot like the
animals that they tracked and hunted.
But in many places across the country,
there is evidence in the pollen record for burning
and vegetation disturbance. Many palynologists
(pollen analysts) think that Mesolithic people may
have caused these and there is similar evidence on
Greenhead Moss. Between 7110 and 6660 years ago
(290 - 270 cm), heaths and sedges in this area
near the bog edge were replaced by grass and herbs,
especially a plant called cow-wheat. This suggests
that the ground could have been disturbed. Pollen
grains from bog asphodel and louse-wort also suggest
that the peat surface was more open because these
plants do not grow in shady conditions. Similar
changes do not occur again until we see evidence for
woodland disturbance caused by people and their
grazing livestock.
Cow wheat (Melampyrum)
© SNH
Farmers and livestock: managing
the land
Why would people have disturbed
the plants here?
Perhaps the hunters cleared an opening
to encourage grazing animals to use it. Grazing could
have kept the area open and made the animals easier
to find and kill. Dung from grazing animals might
have provided nutrients that encouraged grass to
grow, rather than heather, which grows better on
nutrient-poor soils. After all, hunting in woods with
large but silent predators and herbivores must have
been dangerous and time consuming.
A replica of the
6000-year old yew bow found at Rotten Bottom near
Moffat in the Scottish Southern Uplands. Was it lost
by a Mesolithic (stone age) hunter?
But after around 500 years the
same bog vegetation returned and the grassy glade
disappeared as animals and the hunters shifted to
another area.
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