Rescuing a Mesolithic foreshore

Working with the tide
Working with the tide is never easy. Time limits on a tide-threatened site are very strict and the whole process can be extremely dangerous. Working with Martin Bell's team from Reading University, Time Team struggled against the elements at Goldcliff, on the Severn estuary, to rescue a piece of Mesolithic foreshore.

Squares in the clay
With only a few hours available each day when the site was not under water, the key to this excavation was to take the beach back to dry land. In order to do this, 25-centimetre blocks of clay foreshore were marked and then removed using special steel tins (a bit like cake tins).

Back on land, each block was then rebuilt, like a jigsaw, into one-metre square sections on tabletops at an excavating station set up by the incident room. Each square could then be carefully excavated by hand and all the spoil wet sieved and floated to search for organic remains.

Evidence for Mesolithic life
Additional trenches were opened further up the shore to try to find the elusive evidence that typifies the Mesolithic period: tiny flint tools (microliths) and charred grains. This was a period when people didn't make use of permanent structures, or even pottery, so looking for evidence of their presence is like finding a needle in a haystack.

The painstaking work of the Team paid off. Stone-cutting tools and a flint point were discovered together with charred elderberry and raspberry seeds, indicating that the site was used seasonally and usually in the autumn. Together with the wonderful snapshot of the past provided by 8,000-year-old human footprints preserved in the clay, these finds helped to paint an intriguing picture of life on this site some eight millennia ago.

Geological map

The geological map of the area featured in the programme is Geological Map Sheet 263, Cardiff (S&D) 1:50 000, 1998. Reproduced by permission of the British Geological Survey. © NERC. Copyright permission number IPR/50-48C. All rights reserved.

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