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Accessing Scotland's Past Project
Event ID 560952
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Accessing Scotland's Past Project
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/560952
The fields around Yarlside have revealed a number of prehistoric flint artefacts over the years. Several are held in the National Museum of Scotland, while others were last recorded in the collections of the Wilton Lodge Museum, Hawick.
At least some of these flints are microliths: tiny blades and points which would have been used collectively in a larger composite object, such as a harpoon or a spear. Microliths are characteristic of the Mesolithic, around 8,000 years ago.
The dense concentration of artefacts encountered at Yarlside suggests that the area was the site of a settlement in Mesolithic times. Contemporary sites investigated elsewhere have indicated that people lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They moved frequently to exploit different natural resources, and consequently, they tended to live in temporary campsites. Traces of these insubstantial structures would have been obliterated long ago at Yarlside, which has seen thousands of years of agricultural activity since the Mesolithic period.
Text prepared by RCAHMS as part of the Accessing Scotland's Past project
