ABSTRACT
Western Scotland, stretching from the Isle of Lewis in the north to the Isle of Arran in the south, with its indented mainland coast and diverse range of landscapes from mountains to coastal plains, provides an excellent region for exploring the character of Mesolithic coastal exploitation. To do so requires a long-term commitment to piece together the evidence from multiple archaeological sites throughout the study region, often located in challenging fieldwork locations. That work began in western Scotland at the end of the 19th century when Late Mesolithic middens on the tiny island of Oronsay were discovered and continues today with ongoing excavations at the site of Rubha Port an t-Seilich, Isle of Islay. We describe our current understanding of the chronology of the Mesolithic activity by accumulating radiocarbon dates and examining the distribution of ‘activity events’ between the Pleistocene–Holocene transition c. 11 650 cal BP and the start of the Neolithic at c. 5800 cal BP. By ‘activity event’, we refer to a discretely dated visit to a specific location. We interpret the changing frequencies of activity events through time as reflecting the impact of climate change on population density. Several Mesolithic sites have multiple activity events, suggesting these were localities especially favoured by the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. We discuss a selection of such locations, seeking to identify the activities that were undertaken and interpreting these as responses to temporal and geographical variation in resource availability.
