PARK TALK: Evidence of our earliest ancestors is never far away in Cairngorms National Park
Picture this – a pitched tent, high on a hillside, three people are busy with the evening tasks, one is fixing his kit, the other two are preparing food.
It sounds like a typical wild camp that might be seen on any hill in the park, however, this camp took place 8000 years ago and this is a scene that archaeologists describe from an excavated site at Mar Lodge Estate.
The kit was stone flints being sharpened, the pattern of off-cuts from the stone showed the extent of the tent.
It is so ordinary, yet amazing that we can know about it now in the 21st Century.
This remarkable glimpse into the everyday life of our ancestors shows us that they were not so different from ourselves.
They were there hunting for food, perhaps fixing an evening meal before settling down to sleep.
The size of the camp suggests a smaller group perhaps looking to bring back food to the larger family group further down the glen.
We know from sparse archaeological records like this that the Cairngorms have been home to people for perhaps 10,000 years.
This is not the only site to have been discovered; another site on the River Dee was revealed after peat was washed away, showing that hunter gatherers lived and flourished there.
They would have been at home in places we now call wild and would have read the landscape far more deeply that we do now, because their lives and livelihoods depended on this ability.
Their sense of dùthchas (being connected to place) was as profound is it could possibly be.
A neolithic flint arrowhead was recently found just outside the national park by park resident Dr Pete Cosgrove who was examining peatland for future restoration.
The arrowhead was just sitting on the surface, revealed after being under the peat for thousands of years.
The craftsmanship in its making is astonishing, carefully knapped to have a balanced symmetrical form, it is still sharp after all this time.
The find is so good that it is of national significance and will be in a museum soon.
It reminds us that our ancestors didn’t just survive in this upland environment but thrived. They had sophisticated technology that was developed for hunting and adapted for the environment.
They had the means and social structures to travel wide areas seeking food, shelter, medicinal herbs and other materials needed to live here.
They exchanged ideas and spread technology through meeting other groups and bartered for goods from around our island (although it wasn’t one at the start of this period).
It shows us too that this landscape has been used continuously since just after the ice age.
Our knowledge of people from this time is very small and there is much more to be discovered.
If you are out in the park and find what you think might be a stone tool or arrowhead, don’t clean it, but note the location as precisely as you can (the what3words app is good for this), photograph it in situ and then take it to your local museum for identification.
