Mesolithic Surrey
By L. S. B. LEAKEY*
IN a windswept ploughed field at Abinger Common, Surrey, tarpaulins have been temporarily erected over an irregular pit about fourteen feet long and ten feet wide and not quite four feet deep. From time to time during the past two months groups of -Scientists and others have visited the site to look at the oldest preserved humanly-made dwelling in the British Isles. This irregular pit, now carefully protected against the elements until it can be roofed over, is a pit-dwelling of the Mesolithic hunters who lived on the Surrey and Sussex greensand belt some nine or ten thousand years ago.
At that time In Europe the ice-sheets of the last phase of the Great Ice Age were in full retreat northwards, and as the climate became warmer the descendants of the Palaeolithic cave-dwellers migrated northwards to Scandinavia and Yorkshire and westwards to southern and western Britain. There were three main culture groups, the Maglemosians, mainly in the north, the Tardenoisians. and the Azilians. Elements of both the first two reached Britain at about the same time, and while a true Maglemosian culture is to be found in East Yorkshire and southwards at Broxbourne, the region south of the Thames was mainly colonised by an offshoot of the Tardenoisians. But these people, right from the beginning, seem to have been to some extent in contact with and influenced by the Maglemosians. As their isolation in England became more complete, this southern group of wandering hunters invented a variety of new types of stone tools, so that in time their culture became sufficiently specialised to rank as something distinctive, which is known as the Horsham Culture.
The evidence of the Abinger site suggests that here we have a pit-dwelling of an early group of the Tardenoisian invaders who had not yet developed any specialised tools of their own to distin- guish their culture from that of their fellow tribesmen on the Continent, but who were already in contact with the Maglemosians and borrowing from them the idea of the primitive tranchet axe. So far as the available evidence shows at present, the Mesolithic hunters of the Surrey region spent most of the summer and autumn months wandering about the heathlands in small groups—probably in separate family parties—hunting and gathering nuts and wild fruits. Many indications of temporary camping-places or summer bivouacs are known, and on these only a few flint tools are to be found and perhaps the traces of hearths.
But in winter these hunting nomads seem to have gathered together in semi-permanent settlements or villages of pit-dwellings —probably in order to protect themselves and their families better from hungry wolf-packs and to benefit from the advantages of *Dr. Leakey is Curator of the Coryndon Museum at Nairobi. communal labour. The pit in the field at Abinger Common is one of the dwellings of such a winter settlement, and its interest lies in the fact that it does represent—as I have already said—one of the oldest, if not the oldest, preserved humanly-made dwellings in our country. Why, we may ask, did these people dig holes to live in instead of building huts above ground ? The answer is not far to seek. Although the flint implements which they made include a variety of specialised tools such as scrapers, knives, chisels, awls and tiny saw-blades, besides arrow-barbs, there is nothing that could be used at all successfully for felling trees.
Doubtless their summer bivouacs did consist of rough booths of small branches and withies broken by hand, but such shelters would be poor protection during the winter months. If, then, they could not cut poles for real huts, had they the tools for digging pits ? We have found no digging-tools, but it is most significant that the pit-dwelling sites of these southern Mesolithic invaders of Britain are almost without exception in the regions of the greensand and other similar geological formations, and never on the chalk or on the wealden clays. Pits could be dug into the partially consolidated greensand by means of pointed °sticks or even the bare hands—a feat that would be next to impossible in the chalk. So it seems that the greensand belt was chosen because it meant that adequate living quarters could be made there to house the families during the winter without having to fell trees.
The pit dwelling at Abinger has two post-holes on either side of one end of the long axis of the pit, and it seems probable that in these two post-holes short forked sticks were placed (such as could be collected in the woodlands among the fallen branches after a storm) with probably a single horizontal cross piece. Then, with this extremely simple foundation, a rough lean-to roof could be built over the pit, constructed of branches and saplings broken by hand, and covered perhaps with grass or the skins of deer. Such a roof would turn the pit virtually into a man-made cave, and thus we see these people, only recently -descended from the cave-dwellers, meetingt,:their needs for housing the increasing population in a caveless land by making caves for themselves.
It is a fascinating story, and the Abinger site shows promise of yielding more information, for it"ii clear that there are other pits adjacent to the one found and excavated this year, and it is possible that we may be able to discover the lay-out of the village and even to find out whether already, ten thousand years ago, some specialisation in craftsmanship had begun_ to develop. The one pit excavated had only two burins or chisels and very few good scrapers, but it had many small knives and arrow barbs. Ww it therefore a hunter's home ? And shall we find that another hut in the village has many chisels, indicating the home of a worker in wood and bone and deer-antler ? Shall we find that the village was fenced round with a rough wooden stockade as a protection from the wolves ? The answer to these and to many other questions will be known when the work is completed.
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