Book Review: Blick Mead: Exploring the 'first place' in the Stonehenge landscape
Submitted by Andy B on Wednesday, 06 March 2019 Page Views: 4574
Multi-periodCountry: England County: Wiltshire Type: Ancient Village or SettlementInternal Links:
Rob Ixer writes: Despite the regular, often quite incarnadine dispatches to the red top newspapers, this is the first substantial (and for the greater part, most welcome) account of Blick Mead and its finds.
It is not, I would say, a monograph accessible to even an informed lay reader, but closer to a set of edited, detailed specialist appendices - but with an added twist that even the ‘appendices’ have appendices!
Four chapters are the heart and worth and merit of the book. They describe
a) the geoarcheological borehole survey, (lithostratigraphy, plant, insect and pollen analyses) preservation of the last three is generally very poor and not very informative - but that is the nature of the site;
b) the flint lithics in enormous detail - there is almost no other stone of note or worth;
c) large animal bones - including the often mentioned aurochsen (*) and
d) smaller vertebrates - popularly reported as the left-overs from French cuisine.
These chapters give the site’s data, they are well-written and scientifically rigorous as to be expected from the authors. Speculation on the data is suitably measured and reasonable, (other than a cock-eyed suggestion that a tabular sandstone block may possibly be a phallus). The chapters are a clear record of the importance of Blick Mead as the repository of major Mesolithic (for the most part) worked flint and vertebrate fauna but also show that field conditions are not conducive to the preservation of much else.
There are no proved structural remains, no monuments and clearly nothing remotely megalithic, the few photographs of the trenches (mainly given in an earlier chapter) show that well; but without more expansive captions it is difficult to see much else.
Blick Mead is not Star Carr, probably can never be so, but this book, mainly a record of specialist work done on material collected the earliest years of the project, shows that the site deserves serious attention and really does not need over-egging nor referencing to the nearby ‘Stones’.
Review by Rob Ixer.
(*) Obscure fact: The plural of aurochs is aurochsen
Blick Mead: Exploring the 'first place' in the Stonehenge landscape: Archaeological excavations at Blick Mead, Amesbury, Wiltshire 2005-2016
Authors: David Jacques, Tom Phillips, Tom Lyons
Studies in the British Mesolithic and Neolithic Seriss
Publisher: Peter Lang.
Hardcover 238 pages
Feb 2018
Available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com
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