 O'r gwrthodd, ddweud, mae Jeff ydych yn ddim yn ddim yn dweud o'r sgolwydau starcaeth ar y cwmffrin, mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud yna sy'n deall yn y Cymru. Ond o hynny, mae'n ddweud o'r gweithio ar y gwrthodd, mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r gweithio. A oherwydd, ddweud, mae'n ddweud o'r gweithio, mae'r cyd-dweud yn ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r gweithio. Bydd nesaf y gallu Pyth, nhw'n gwneud hynny'n gwybod mewn drathag y maesf mwrdd gyffredig, i'r ffordd yn ein ynchawb am y cyffredig o'r pwysig jywedol 11,000 oed. Felly, mae'r cyffredig maen nhw sefydl i arfer i'r programau telefishams ar y L懷odraith a'u rhywbeth ychydig felly'r hedaniaeth yn ddiwedig ar ddiwedig. So, yn y traw, mae'n ganlŵr i'n fydd gan gweithio y model sy'n cinfa diatwy, And also think about the site within the wider context, all of which might help us think about what we might find beneath the North Sea in terms of the archaeology. So there's been a punctuated history of research at the site starting with the discovery by local amateur archaeologist John Maugh. The famous excavations by Graham Clark and further work by the Vale of Prickering Research Trust and finally over 10 years off excavation work by my and my co-director's Chantal, Canella ac Barry Taylor. The excavations by Clark can be seen here, a number of long trenches with extraordinary preservation. Here students are cleaning wood within the peat, and this one also shows the depth of the peat as does this one. If you look at the right hand corner, you can just see a cow right at the top of the trench, which helps to scale a bit on this one. A wealth of wonderful and rare objects were uncovered during these excavations, which undoubtedly made the site famous in the archaeological world. 21 of the antler frontlets were found, these are the only ones known in Britain, and 191 barbed points, which is well over 90% of all barbed points known in Britain as well. All of these finds and more were concentrated in the main part of the excavated area, and this is a plan of the flints by square yard, showing the concentrations dramatically decreasing towards the edges. And this is basically why Clark thought he'd excavated the whole site. Several decades later, the Vale of Pickering Research Trust excavated a trench to conduct paleoenvironmental analysis. The trench was about 25 metres from Clark's trench, placed far away to avoid the archaeology. However, of course, as you might have guessed, there's plenty of archaeology in this trench, including flint, bone, antler, and most intriguingly, this wood right at the far end of the trench, which had been split and hewn, and was thought to be the earliest evidence of systematic carpentry in Europe. However, no further work was carried out, and it was unclear whether this was maybe some sort of fat form or perhaps a trackway. From 2004, Shantel, Barry and I directed further excavations at the site, and in the first phase we conducted field walking, test pitting, and dug a large trench on the dry land, which is, hopefully you can see my cursor here, but this one in Red SC 23. This is Clark's trench just to the side of it, which shows the scale here. The area where we've got the hashed area is all the field walking and the test pitting that was done, which shows the extent of the site. Basically, what we can see here is that overall we've dug less than 5% of the site. Just to give you a sense of scale of this area, if you take this peninsula area here with all these test pits down it, this is what it looks like actually in the field, so it's a very large field full of mesolithic archaeology. In the second phase of our fieldwork, we received historic England and ERC funding for the post-glacial project to conduct a large scale excavation at Starcar and also other investigations around the lake. SC 23 is our dry land trench, which we excavated previously in 2007-2008, and the excavations in 2013-15 basically filled in this area between Clark's trench and this dry land trench. Also, we have the trench VP 85A, this one right down here, which is the trench from the 1980s. The idea behind this was to get a better understanding of occupation and activity areas across one area. Again, here's a kite shot to give you a sense of scale again. The tent is in Clark's area here, this green patch to the right is where SC 23 and a structure on the dry land was found. As you can see from a number of these photos, the excavations spanned both the waterlogged PT areas, which are the much darker brown areas, and the dry land areas, which are the light grey areas in these slides. This slide, I think, really clearly shows that slope down from the dry land, the water's edge, the darker peat, which is where the water would have been, and indeed you can see that there's water pooling in areas here now. This is what I meant at the beginning about peeling back the peat to reveal this buried land surface, which helps you envisage how people were living in this landscape at that time. What did we find? On the dry land, we found evidence of at least three structures, if not four. This is a plan of the central structure. It's fairly ephemeral, and it had been truncated by earlier excavations. It would have been a complete circle, not a half circle there, but that's the sunken middle part of it, which had been dug out, and it's surrounded by post holes. You can also see that there are these other sort of semi circles of post holes around as well, which may be other features of the structures as well. Then in the waterlogged part of the site, what would have been the edge of the lake, we had the opportunity to further investigate the platform found in 1985. Here, we can see it as a blank rectangle in this map. Not only were we able to better understand that platform, but we found two others and a further massive scatter of wood. Finally, we were also amazed to find a bit of Clark's excavated area still intact, this bulk, which hadn't been excavated. Thanks to an incredible dating programme by Alex Bayliss, funded by Historic England, we were able to analyse 223 dates from the site, some of them historic dates as well, demonstrating that the site was used for over 800 years. This has helped to develop a picture of how the site has changed across time and space, and I'm going to give you a very quick run through some of this now. We start with this detritol wood scatter, as we call it, the earliest dated part of the occupation from about 9300 BC. This appears to be the earliest date for mesolithic occupation in Britain, so about three centuries after the beginning of the Holocene. I think there was a question about this yesterday. This is what it looked like on the ground, a mess of both worked wood, which had been split, and some natural pieces of wood as well. There was some animal bone within it, but not a huge amount, but what was really intriguing was this particular grouping here. These are the bones of a red deer, and when excavating on site, we thought that perhaps we had a deer who'd died or had been posited in the lake. But on analysis in the lab, Becky Knight, our zoo archaeologist, realised that this deer actually had two left back legs. Obviously two left legs is not normal or even possible, so there are a range of explanations for this. Perhaps people had deposited limbs and other bits of red deer into this area to reconstruct a deer body. You can also see that there's no head bones, but there is a frontlet very close to this collection of bones. What's also very interesting in this area is this elk skull, which was found, and this provides us with some of the earliest dating for the site, which bears some resemblance to the site of Lumby Mose in Denmark, where elk bones and an elk amplomatic were found, again very early on in the Holocene. Moving on, we have the first of the three timber platforms. The central platform constructed in the middle of the 90th century CalBC after the end of the detrital wood scatter. This was composed of three layers of timbers, some were split, some were tree trunks, and this appeared to have been used for several generations before being covered by peat. Very little has been found on any of these platforms, but we get the odd artifact or piece of bone. Here we've got a collection of lithics, which have been used for animal processing, and perhaps they've even been kept in a bag, which has since deteriorated. The questions are, were they lost, had they been discarded, or was this actually some kind of special deposition? Then later on we see the eastern platform. We couldn't get so many dates from this one, but it does seem to be likely that it was constructed after the central platform. Here you can see it from above. You can see the scale of it. It's quite huge. It's very close to the central platform, which is that's the remnants of that one there. You can also see how a trench, which we put in in 2006, missed this platform by literally 50 centimetres. I would say that this is the advantage of doing large-scale excavations, open area excavations, so you don't miss things when you put in smaller trenches. The eastern and western structures on the dry land, which you can see here, have been highlighted by the burnt flints, the red dots around them. These appear to date to around 8800 BC, although there is a possibility that they could date earlier. At a similar point in time, we were able to excavate the Clarks area, which dates to about that same period. Here it is just in plan. You can see just how densely packed this was with fines. This is a close-up showing the incredible richness and just the way in which it is jam-packed with wood, bone, antler and so on. Very interesting from the dates again, it looks like this is contemporary with the dry land structures, but it also could have been accumulated in anything as short as perhaps just one year. Although it might have been longer, it might have been a generation or so. Here's another photo of the incredible richness and density of that material. We haven't found anything else like this on this side or indeed others in the area. Within that, we found a number of more frontlets. Altogether on our excavations, we found 12 more antler frontlets. Slightly further to the south of this area, we found this incredible pendant, only the size of a guitar lectrum, very small, very thin, very fragile and engraved with these mysterious lines. Then in terms of wooden artefacts in this area, we also found a bow, a number of digging sticks and a wooden platter. It's quite difficult to know what it is, but it looks like just a large wooden carved piece. Finally, we moved to the western platform, which is very close by Clarks area, which was built two or three generations after the eastern platform. After this, there are some further evidence of occupation, but it is very ephemeral and it's not long before the site really appears to go out of use. Here is that western platform as well again, so you get a sense of that. It's incredible to think that the site was used in this way for 800 years. From macrofossil data, Barry Taylor was also able to construct the environmental picture, which shows a change in the local environment from fairly open water in Zone 1 here to more ferns and fenn plants and a croaching of reeds around the lake edge in Zone 2. In Zone 3, much reduced open water and much more of a fenn landscape. In addition, we worked with Simon Blockley and his team from Vaughan Holloway and the University of Southampton to call the lake sediments and use a range of proxy data to build up a picture of the environment and climate over the period of occupation. What we were able to show is that people lived through an abrupt climate event, very similar to that that would have been experienced in the 8.2 event, and yet the activities on site appear to remain largely unchanged. They were still building platforms, they'll have the same sort of artifacts and so on, still were there, suggesting that these people were resilient to this abrupt climatic event. But our research goes beyond Starr Cards, the wider landscape, and this is the Baill of Pickering today. There's no lake, the peat has developed over the millennia, and a submerged landscape lies beneath these lovely green fields. However, thanks to the vision of Tim Shadler Hall, who's in this photo but with his back towards us, and decades of research for all going through this peat, we have been able to map the contours of the ancient lake. It's about four kilometres east to west and two kilometres north to south, with several islands in the middle of it, and furthermore through digging test bits and doing these at around 15 metre intervals around what would have been the lake edge. It's been possible to map further sites around the shoreline, some of which are mesolithic, but some of which are also paleolithic. And this map shows just some of those sites, we now know of over 25. At the same time as digging at Starr Car, we also undertook some excavations at Flickston Island here, you can see it's just a couple of fields along from Starr Car. And this was another site that was originally found by John Moore, the local amateur archaeologist who discovered Starr Car. So here's a kite shot of these excavations. We were down at the lake edge and also on the top of the island again. And here we uncovered more of John Moore's site and realised it was a long blade site. We didn't actually find much flint at all, but what we did find was the remains of a large number of horses which have been butchered on the edge of the lake. This is a very rare find indeed for a site of this period. And we're currently working on the dating with Alex Bayliss and hope to be able to resolve whether this site actually dates to the very start of the Holocene or whether it's a bit earlier. What was also very nice about this site was that it also produced a large number of horse hoof prints in the late months. So overall this is a really rich landscape, archaeological landscape, telling a story of activities from the Lake Pallelithic through to the Mesolithic. It's remarkable how people use this landscape and some sites for centuries and how they appear to be relatively settled at the number of these locations. But although we feel we know a lot more about it as ever, the archaeology has thrown out many more questions and there is still so much to learn from this landscape and indeed the one under the North Sea, which is very nearby. And if we return briefly to the North Sea and think about Starcar in that context, we can reflect on how many of the things that we found at Starcar have clear parallels with other countries in northwest Europe. For instance we've got that elk which deposited in the lake just as the elk deposited in Denmark. We've also got the pendant and we have an amber pendant that was found by Clark with clear parallels to amber pendants and the kind of geometric artwork found in Denmark. And of course we've got the antler frontlets with clear parallels to a number of sites in Germany. The exciting research on Doggerland that we've all heard about over the last couple of days has enabled us to begin to think about how this fits together and how connections across Doggerland might have happened. I'm going to actually just end with a short film made by Marcus Abbott, which hopefully takes you back in time to what things might have looked like more than 11,000 years ago. So I'll just read out the subtitles here, but Starcar is a mesolithic site on the edge of a prehistoric lake. The people at Starcar placed timbers in the shallow water. People also placed artefacts in the water, like this antler headdress. In one area of the site there was an extraordinary accumulation of artefacts. This consisted of thousands of pieces of bone, flint, antler and beads and included many more headdresses. Evidence shows people lived at the site for around 800 years. Over the generations people built platforms by the lake edge. So I hope that that gives you a little sense of how we imagine Starcar and that landscape to have looked all that time ago and perhaps how we might imagine Doggerland as well to have looked. But hopefully we can think about creating further reconstructions and so on in the future. I'll just end by saying that if you'd like to know more about our excavations at Starcar, our two monographs are available for free from the White Rose Press and we also have further information on our website. So finally a big thank you to my co-director Chantal Canella and Barry Taylor, the 70 plus staff and specialists who worked with us over the period and over 400 volunteers who worked on site and everyone who supported the project and of course our funders. And finally thank you for listening. Thank you so much Nikki. I mean what beautiful archaeology I totally love those horse prints and they're fabulous. We do have some questions in and we have a couple of minutes for questions as well. So they're coming in thick fast, that means they're moving. So the first one came when you were talking about the flints and it's from John Adams who asked what was the purpose of burning flints. I think well Chantal Canella who's our flint expert can probably talk more about this than I can. But I mean I think some of the flint is accidentally burnt which is why we don't have very clear evidence for hearts but there is a lot of burning within the structures or around the structures and particularly around the western structures. There's a lot of burning and so it is more likely to be accidental than purposeful. Yeah, thank you. The next question comes from Susan Biddle who is asking what many people I think might have been thinking which is, is the arrangement of wood in the platforms at Starcar similar to the wooden benches at Baldner Cliff? Well I think probably Gary can answer that better than I can knowing those better but I mean I don't think they're quite the same but I mean Gary, is Gary still here? Gary do you have a view on this? It looks like he's here. Looks like he's here. Or maybe that's a discussion that might be held later. I think I mean the advantage for us is that we were able to clear them very clearly and I think that, I mean each of the platforms are slightly different particularly the central platform which has these three layers on top of each other whereas the other two are just single layers. So even that we've got three platforms they're not actually very similar to each other. And it was the same with the structures on the dry land, there was a lot of differences between those so we tend to expect these sorts of things to be the same and they're quite often not. The next question comes from Bjorn Nielsen who asks, or says thanks Nicky and did you succeed in doing dendro chronology of the wooden remains despite compression and decay? Hi Bjorn, no sadly we did try, the big birch tree that Clark actually found in the trenches, we excavated that trench and it was still there and Alex did take a section of that to try dendro dating but sadly it wasn't possible. And there are a couple more if that's right where I keep time. So from Maggie Fleming, I think it is, was there any evidence of fishing from example the platforms and they say I believe there are platforms in Lake Garda in northern Italy, but I guess. Thanks. So, I mean we know they were fishing there because we have we have evidence of fishing from some fish bones for many years. There was a paper in Journal of Archaeological Science about why would they know fish found at Starcar, but we have found some fish bones from Starcar. We've also found evidence of processing fish from some of the flint tools of where we've done useware. Whether they were using the platforms for fishing is really hard to say, I mean I think the platforms were probably used for stabilising the muds on the lake edge, and maybe it was possible to fish from them. But it's, it's, there's, there's no evidence really for what the platforms for used were used for which is very frustrating. That's one of the questions that's been raised from our excavations. So that, that covered a few of the questions actually, there are quite a few questions that the platforms once just come in as well, which, which is anonymous which says something asks whether the platforms were definitely submerged rather than being at the surface, then think about the potential use and visibility at the time. Well, it's, I mean we, we did a lot of thinking about this is possible that we think that they were very close to the surface they may have been exposed seasonally, perhaps, but if they had been exposed all the time they obviously would have rotted away so the, they, and it's very difficult to measure that the amount of water that would have been over the top of them but we think that they were probably very close to the surface though. Yeah, hard, hard to be certain or hard to really assess the seasonal changes in that. One last question if that's right that's coming from Ola. Ola Rajala, he's asked where the flint objects in the bag used. Yes, I think. Yes, I think they were used for animal processing animal flesh. We, this, this use where from around the site and different kinds of, of use where and with a number of these caches that the flint has been used before it's been cashed as well interestingly. Yes, so Chantal says yes almost all for processing animal remains even very promising ones. Thanks Chantal. Thanks Chantal.