Hunter-Gatherers in the Landscape: Surveys and Excavations in the Eastern Vale of Pickering, 1976-2000

Abstract

This monograph represents the results of over twenty years of fieldwork and research on the Late Glacial (Late Upper Palaeolithic) and Early Holocene (Mesolithic) landscape around Lake Flixton, in the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire. The area of focus of this research was on the eastern end of the Vale of Pickering, demarcated by the line of the A64 trunk road in the west, and running east as far as the village of Muston (Fig. 1.1-2). This encompasses the basin of Lake Flixton, as originally described by John Moore (1951), and its immediate surroundings, which at its maximum extent measures roughly 5.5 km east-west, up to 2.5 km north-south, and covers approximately 12.5 km2 in toto. The work was initially undertaken between 1976 and 1985 as part of the Seamer Carr Project, and then from 1985 to 2000 by the Vale of Pickering Research Trust (VPRT). Research by the VPRT continued after 2000, with elements being later subsumed within new projects at Star Carr (Milner et al. 2018a, 2018b), Flixton Island (Milner et al. 2017) and Flixton School House Farm (Taylor 2012, 2019; Taylor and Gray Jones 2009), and on the Early Holocene palaeoecology (Taylor 2019) and a recently published summary of the VPRT-sponsored palaeoecological research (Innes et al. 2022).