4. Conclusion

Of course, for this historically contingent society, their lithic technology was but one part of their technological repertoire, which included organic materials, for which there is scant evidence in comparison to stone in Ireland. As well as having been expert 'geologists' we can view the Mesolithic communities as having been expert anatomists and ecologists, albeit in their own idiosyncratic ways and through the lens of their worldview. Rather than from an era of specialists, they were probably more akin to polymaths. As noted by Taçon (1991) and La Planta (2007), stone can also be understood as an animate 'organic' entity, and it may be our particular parochialism to see it as an innately inanimate collection of minerals. This brings me back to the notion of local and non-local stone and issues of the glacial movement of material, and how this was perceived in the Mesolithic. If we can accept that these Mesolithic communities were expert geologists with a depth of knowledge about the material distribution in the landscape of primary and secondary sources of the various materials, and they possibly perceived this stone material as alive and growing, how does this relate to glacial erratics, as discussed at the conference? Did they perceive these as offspring of known outcrops, sprouting like fungi from an underground web of spores? And how does this relate to their use and deposition of lithics – their use of a variety of materials and their deposition of these differing raw materials from different locales together?

The 19th-century explosion of lithic collecting in Ireland was primarily a northern Irish phenomenon, where the main sources of flint, especially in situ flint, lie. While some researchers, especially Knowles, noted a wide range of raw materials, for the most part discussions on materials for flaked stone were limited to flint or chert. This research has shown that at least 18 broad types of raw material was used by Mesolithic communities for their flaked stone repertoire in the west, with more used for their axes and coarse stone tools and hammerstones. Clearly, this is far from a chert/flint dichotomy. An apparent pattern is that in the post-Mesolithic the range of raw materials for flaked stone tools becomes restricted, and the social implications of this are unclear. For the raw materials for stone axes from Ireland in general the converse is the case, with a more restricted range in the Mesolithic compared to the post-Mesolithic. This is not to say that in the post-Mesolithic no other materials were used for flaked stone – there were, and Knowles' quote was, for the most part, discussing post-Mesolithic material, but these appear to be more isolated and localised, whereas in the Mesolithic all these materials appear to be used together in the same locales. For the west, little work has been carried out, and research begun a generation ago was not followed through; consequently the record is scant and only recently have Mesolithic sites begun to be excavated. While 18 broad rock types have been identified as having been used by the Mesolithic communities in their flaked stone repertoire, there is as yet little information on their procurement strategies and procurement locations, beyond a broad description of material being 'local' or 'non-local'.

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