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Finding the earliest inhabitants of Boston Spa
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Finding the earliest inhabitants of Boston Spa
Location: Leeds
A Local Heritage Initiative grant has helped us to uncover the history of our own village and our discoveries - a line of mysterious pits, patterns of stones resembling animals, two rocks carved with symbolic lines, perhaps marking the entrance to a Neolithic underworld - have given us a glimpse of 5,000-year-old prehistoric rituals. Malcolm Barnes, Chair of the Boston Spa and District Community Archaeology Group, describes some unusual discoveries just outside their village near Leeds and speculates on their meaning.
The Yorkshire village of Boston Spa developed after the discovery in 1743 of a saline spring in the bank of the River Wharfe. In 1999 our newly-formed group began looking for traces of earlier activity in the area. We encountered scatters of prehistoric flint tools and concentrations of manufacture waste within a large loop of the river on the edge of the village. The site gave us the opportunity to find out what was happening here before this picture-postcard village existed, before recorded history in fact. Could we discover who the earliest inhabitants were?
Over the next three years we doubled the area fieldwalked and, as might be expected, found that the proportion of flint artefacts increased and the manufacture waste decreased as we moved away from the main processing areas. All stages of knapping were represented, with a range of diagnostic tools from the mesolithic, neolithic and bronze age periods, suggesting hunting, camping and settlement. Although a little of the flint is poorer material from the Yorkshire Wolds and some of the knapped pieces point to times when raw material was scarce, the majority is plentiful, good-quality boulder-clay flint from the east coast.
The site lies on ancient east-west and north-south routes, where the river cuts through the magnesian limestone belt. Apart from one concentration of Mesolithic pieces on a river terrace, tools from all periods overlie the site, suggesting intermittent visits over long periods. The numbers of diagnostic pieces, however, peak in the neolithic, and the large amounts of debitage and nodules of raw material suggest that a community may have developed then, for whom the processing of flint was important, either for their own use or for trading with other groups.
Puzzlingly, we found large quantities of burnt flint spread all across the site, with several concentrations. We had two nodules thermoluminescence dated as a pilot test and the two dates, neolithic and medieval, suggested that some of the burnt flint was prehistoric, but some had been burnt post-manufacture during land clearance. As we had plenty of neolithic material, we decided to test a late-neolithic burnt scraper, which interested us because it looked as if it had been heated more than necessary to aid the knapping process. This again produced a medieval date, confirming our theory.
We were unable to locate any occupation layers or structures and test pitting had found only a level to which flint and later finds had settled. We needed to delve further to find our early community. A Local Heritage Grant funded an aerial photography survey, which highlighted features mainly resembling field and enclosure boundaries. It also helped us target areas for a geophysical survey. This showed a feature coinciding with two clusters of neolithic flint tools on our fieldwalking plots. We thought it could be either a ploughed-out ditch line, or even a pit alignment associated with unenclosed settlement. It had not shown up on the aerial photographs, whereas a Romano-British ditch approaching from the north but stopping just short of it, did.
It lay on a low ridge running roughly east west across part of the neck of land inside the river loop. Excavation revealed five segregated bath-shaped pits (nos. 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9; no. 4 was natural), the largest 2.8 by 1.1 metres and 0.68 metres deep, excluding the 27 cms. of plough soil which had been carefully machined away.
The top of each pit was cleaned by hand so as not to disturb any capping. Their fill was clean, fairly homogeneous and lacking settlement waste or organic remains, save some tiny pieces of charcoal and a few burnt stones. Most of the segregated pits had been re-dug or enlarged. Apparently they had been refilled soon after construction. It may be that their digging was more important than their contents. Except, however, for one thing. As the pits were cleaned, an enigmatic stone layer appeared in the top of each one.
The stones looked arranged rather than randomly accumulated, each pattern different, stylised or vaguely representational of natural things. Pit 9 stood out clearly with a ‘fish’ shape. Pit 5 a stylised ‘wild bore’ similar to those found on later Iron Age coins. Pit 6 a ‘cow’ or pig ‘even’. Pit 7 two similar headless animal shapes, one behind the other, perhaps even hunting dogs, with lean, fit chests and strong hind quarters. Have the heads been lost later? Who knows? There were too many coincidences to ignore them. What did they mean? Furthermore, excavating the pits revealed jumbles of stones lying at an angle in the fill of those that had been re-dug, as if tipped back in before re-filling and topping with new stone arrangements.
We found that Pit 8 was cut by a short length of shallow ditch, which had removed some of its surface stones. Another short ditch to the south-west contained fragments of Roman greyware pottery. Pit 10, which was small and round, had been cut by a substantial v-shaped ditch, which could be seen on the geophys stretching away to the west.
Three other pits (1, 2 and 3) were shallower, but were also topped by stones and had similar fills. These ‘satellite’ pits appeared to be linked to a central pit complex by a shallow ribbon ditch, which could be partly natural, as it formed a chute diving into the central pit complex. Originally it may have been a water-eroded feature chosen as the focus of the monument. The central pit complex cut into it contained 8 pits of various shapes and sizes (B, C, L, M, N, R, S and V), cut at different times, with some of them overlapping. Unlike the aligned pits, none had stone arrangements on top. Few had finds in them, but those that did were significant.
A scatter of stones containing half of an unworn Roman greyware base, or ‘pot-disc’, was found in Pit N opposite the end of the Romano-British ditch. We wondered if it had been deliberately deposited, as a placatory offering, with the top stones from an aligned pit, when the ditch terminus disturbed it. Pit V contained a rubbing stone, suitable for a saddle quern, which had been burnt and used as a hammer stone. Pit R housed two more rubbing stones. Finally, two carved limestone rocks were discovered in their own separate pits (B and S), both placed face down near the top of the fill.
The carvings are of an unusual linear type. One stone has a more complex design than the other, while both show a sense of spacing and arrangement, with different areas of carving. Within these is a range of motifs: grids, boxes, offsets, diamonds and other linear arrangements. Similar designs have been found on stones in north-east Yorkshire and they have clear parallels with many neolithic passage graves elsewhere in the British Isles and on the continent.
What sense can we make of this extraordinary series of pits and their contents? We may not have found our Neolithic settlement, but we had perhaps found its ceremonial focus. I think the importance of the segregated pits must have been the act of construction and alignment, with surface stone patterns, open to view.
The pits in the central feature, however, have buried deposits, with carvings recalling hidden passage grave art. Could the ditch that links together the different parts of the feature, with the inclined chute into its centre have been a symbolic way from the open into the secret, from the natural into the supernatural? The structured pit deposits might have been an act of closure on leaving the site, especially if the carvings on the stones had in some way represented their relationship with their land. There would be no point in taking them elsewhere. The stones were rooted there, in a field on the edge of what would, thousands of years later, become Boston Spa.
Website: www.bsparch.org.uk
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