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Project background
Archaeo-botany
Excavation
Update
Air Photography & Geophysical Survey
Fieldwalking
Finding the earliest inhabitants of Boston Spa
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Project background
Location: Leeds
Background to the Project
Since Boston Spa and District Community Archaeology Group was formed in 1999 we have been conducting field-work near the village on a prehistoric flint-working and settlement site that is rare in lowland West Yorkshire. Intensive fieldwalking has recorded flint artefacts that suggest temporary or permanent settlement activity from the hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic period (8000-4000BC) to Neolithic (4000-2000BC) and early Bronze Age (2000-1000BC), plus thousands of pieces of burnt flint and waste pieces from flint tool manufacturing. Among the artefacts are a flint barb from a Mesolithic fishing harpoon, a Neolithic axe fragment made of Langdale stone, barbed and tanged, leaf-shaped and oblique flint arrowheads, scrapers, cores and blades from various periods, as well as awls and piercers.
Key to Worked Flints Photo:
(Types)
1.Backed knife; 2.Platform-opposing core; 3.Blade core; 4.Microlith rod; 5.Microlith piercer; 6.Microlith blade; 7.Leaf-shaped arrowhead; 8.Oblique arrowhead; 9.Barbed and tanged arrowhead; 10.Single-platform core; 11.Scraper; 12.Burnt-flint retouched scraper; 13.Scraper; 14.Wolds-flint blade; 15.Modern gunflint; 16.Blade pressure-flaked near end.
(Dates)
1,2 - Early Mesolithic; 6 - Mesolithic; 3,4,5 - Late Mesolithic; 7 - Neolithic; 10,11 - Late Neolithic; 8 - Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age; 9,13 - Early Bronze Age; 15 - Modern; 12,14,16 - Undiagnostic.
The prehistoric flint must have been very important to the people using the site, as most of it was brought all the way from the east coast, though there is a tiny amount of poorer quality Yorkshire wolds flint.
Recently we have been out in the field prospecting for other prehistoric flint sites in the locality in order to see how the site fits into the wider prehistoric landscape, investigating several more sites on river terraces along this stretch of the Wharfe. The group is also gradually plotting the background distribution of flint on arable fields away from these flint sites.
The Boston Spa site is significant because of the amount of manufacture that took place there, reflected in the high proportion of waste flint. We think it may have had an important role at different times throughout prehistory providing temporary hunting camps, permanent or semi-permanent settlement sites for the manufacture and trading of flint and later more permanent stock and arable farming.
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