The procurement and exchange of lithic raw materials on Skye during the Mesolithic period

In contrast to regions like southern Britain and Denmark, where early prehistoric lithic assemblages are dominated heavily or entirely by flint, assemblages from Scotland tend to be more diverse, with assemblages from the Isle of Skye in the Inner Hebrides being the most diverse by far. The variety of raw materials creates some difficulties for lithics specialists, as well as archaeologists in general. However, it also opens up possibilities to discuss areas of interest that are almost impossible to discuss on the basis of flint-only assemblages, such as procurement and exchange of lithic raw materials, as well as social territories. The early prehistoric assemblages from Skye tend to be dominated by flint from the beaches on Skye, bloodstone from the island of Rum immediately south of Skye, Durness chert from Ord in SW Skye, Staffin baked mudstone from northern Skye and quartz, supplemented by minority materials like dolerite and tuff. Due to difficulties in terms of identifying weathered varieties of these raw materials, new categories were invented, such as ‘chalcedonic silica’ and ‘flint-like cherts’, which made it almost impossible to discuss the topics listed above. However, one of the authors (TBB) suggested a way of distinguishing safely between the most important of these raw materials. In the present paper, procurement, exchange and territorial structures on Skye are discussed on the basis of raw materials with limited but geographically well-known outcrops, such as Rum bloodstone, Durness chert, Staffin baked mudstone and massive lapilli tuffs from the extinct Kilchrist caldera in southern Skye. Four Mesolithic assemblages from Skye are classified according to the new understanding of their raw materials, namely Staffin, South Cuidrach, Camas Daraich 2 and Rubh an Dunain. It has been possible to divide Skye into a northern and a southern half due to the different raw material preferences from the excavated sites, and to conclude that their main lithic raw materials were procured within an area with a radius of up to c. 25km from the settlements. It was also possible to infer that the distribution of Rum bloodstone (which was clearly considered a ‘precious’ raw material and exchanged more widely) is stepped, including an inner ring (sites with distances to Rum of up to 80km) and an outer ring (sites with distances to Rum of up to 150km). The core area (up to 25km from the outcrop) is defined by large numbers of bloodstone artefacts per site, whereas the sites in the inner and outer rings are all characterised by few pieces per site. Instead, the main difference between the inner and outer ring is the number of sites with bloodstone – in the inner ring most sites have at least one or two pieces of bloodstone, whereas in the outer ring most sites have none but some rare pieces do occur. An interpretation of the observed patterns is offered, but this interpretation is clearly in need of corroboration from more Mesolithic assemblages, classified, characterised and analysed following the principles defined in this paper.