Exciting find
Discovery on farm
The remains of an ancient Mesolithic settlement has been discovered on a Perthshire farm.
Archaeologists have uncovered the site on Freeland Farm near Forgandenny, and found evidence of prehistoric human activity.
Blades and toolkits were discovered on the farm, allowing archaeologists to learn more about Perthshire’s prehistoric past.
Mesolithic sites have been found throughout Scotland, however until now only a small number had been discovered in the areas around the River Tay.
The findings from the work undertaken on the farm has now been published in a new report called ‘Freeland Farm, Perth and Kinross - mainly late Mesolithic carnelian assemblage from the Lower Strathearn’ by archaeologists Sophie Nicol and Torben Ballin.
The project investigated large parts of the lower-lying fields of the Tay estuary and areas affected by shoreline displacement during the Mesolithic period (9800BC-4000BC) were targeted, allowing researchers to discover the settlement.
Within this part of the river estuary, the researchers found this area to be the most likely place for human activity such as hunting, fishing and gathering.
Co-author Sophie Nicol said: “A number of fields around the Tay estuary were investigated by volunteers through fieldwalking.
“Of these the fields at Freeland Farm yielded the numerically largest lithic assemblage - 707 pieces - and offered the greatest potential to shed light on the late Mesolithic of the Tay estuary.
“The Mesolithic community here at the site of Freeland Farm predominantly exploited local carnelian stone, but it is uncertain whether this was simply a matter of local availability or whether this choice was also a matter of nonfunctional reasoning.”
Co-author Torben Ballin added: “It is difficult to say how the Mesolithic people of Freeland Farm perceived their carnelian, but it is likely that the brown colour had special meaning to them, for example as a means of identifying themselves as belonging to a specific social group.
“They may have seen themselves, and been seen by hunter-gatherer groups in neighbouring territories, as ‘those with brown tool kits,’ just like people on Arran may have seen themselves as ‘those with black tool kits’ and people on Rhum as ‘those with green tool kits’.”
The finds from the Perthshire farm mainly consisted of broadblades, microblades, scrapers and burins, which would have been used for hunting, skinning and processing animal meat and skins for food, clothes, bedding and tents.
These lithic funds were distributed across the site in a linear pattern, probably reflecting the location of the settlement on the shoreline.
Archaeologists working on the project say this distribution of artefacts is fairly dense, suggesting the entire area may have been visited and revisited over a long period.
Previous research has shown scatters left by individual family groups in this time period can be as small as a few metres across, however the scatter at Freeland Farm is much larger.
The early settlers project, which looked into this excavation site, is part of Tay Landscape Partnership and its community participation project which aims to get local people interested in early prehistory.
The full ‘Freeland Farm, Perth and Kinross - a mainly late Mesolithic carnelian assemblage from the Lower Strathearn’ is free to read and download from the Archaeology Reports Online website.