Discussions of mobility have been part and parcel to mesolithic research more or less since the establishment of 'the Mesolithic' as an archaeological period. (Throughout this text I employ names for archaeological periods such as 'mesolithic' and 'neolithic' in their adjectival form only and have therefore chosen to de-capitalise them. This is to emphasise that these are heuristic categories, helping us to discuss sets of material evidence rather than real entities that had any meaning in the prehistoric past.) In particular this is the case since the marriage of mesolithic studies with hunter-gatherer anthropology in the 1960s, best expressed in Lee and DeVore's (1968) statement that hunter-gatherers move around a lot and live in small groups (Lee & DeVore 1968, 12). Yet interestingly, despite being always present in the discussions, movement has mostly remained at the periphery of mesolithic and hunter-gatherer studies. While some studies have focused on 'mobility [as] a critical aspect of hunter-gatherer adaptation' (Smith 2003, 162; see also Kelly 1992) more often than not movement appears to be simply taken as a given to explain other phenomena, such as artefact distribution or to reconcile environmental, ethnographic and archaeological evidences. As Finlay (2004) has observed, we 'measure movement not by considering the processes involved: the following of tracks and trails, the paths and routeways, but like the wind, by its effects on other things' (Finlay 2004, 3). But why is it important that we study or try to understand mobility in early prehistory and what do we actually mean by 'mobility'? In a recent paper Close (2000) suggests that in archaeological terms mobility is mostly equated 'with the act of moving' and concludes that 'we deal, then, with actual movements of people and face such questions as how far, in what direction, how often, and even why' (Close 2000, 50). Having made clear what we tend to refer to when we discuss mobility we must still deal with the significance of doing so. Kelly ( 1992) points out that 'it is important that we learn to recognise the various forms of mobility archaeologically, because the ways people move exert strong influences on their culture and society' (Kelly 1992, 43). In other words, by studying the ways people moved in the past we should be able to gain a wider and deeper understanding of their social, cultural and economic activities more generally.
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