peeblesshire-1967-vol-1/03_049

Transcription

PART II. THE MONUMENTS

1. THE MESOLITHIC PERIOD

The evidence for Mesolithic occupation in Peeblesshire is confined to scattered surface
finds of flint and chert implements, the principal find-spots being in the vicinities of
Peebles and West Linton. ¹ These artifacts belong to a predominantly microlithic industry,
having affinities with the Sauveterrain of France, and comparable in some respects with the
microlithic industries of northern England. ² They represent small groups of nomadic hunters
and fishers who penetrated into the basin of the River Tweed during the fifth and fourth
millennia B.C. and made their way upstream as far as Drumelzier; from there they reached the
valley of the River Clyde by way of the Biggar Gap.

2. THE NEOLITHIC PERIOD (FIG. I)

The only monument in this Inventory that may be assigned to the Neolithic period is the
Long Cairn on Harlaw Muir (No. 1). Although the cairn is now in a very ruinous condition,
there is no trace of any internal chamber, and it may belong to the North British group of long
cairns apparently without chambers. ³ These range in distribution from the West Riding of
Yorkshire, Cumberland and Northumberland, through Dumfriesshire, Roxburghshire and
Berwickshire, to as far north as Aberdeenshire. Little is known about them, but what evidence
there is suggests that they may be the equivalent, in stone, of the classic series of unchambered
long barrows belonging to the Windmill Hill culture.
Only one small sherd of Neolithic pottery is recorded from the county; it is of Secondary
Neolithic Peterborough ware and was found in a cist under a cairn (No. 14), in association
with a Cord Zoned Beaker, a fragment of a second Beaker, a flint saw and thirteen flakes of
flint and chert. Several dozen leaf-shaped flint arrowheads, and about ninety stone axes, are
now in the collections of the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, the Hunterian
Museum, Glasgow, and the Peebles Museum. More than 60% of the flint and stone objects
come from the vicinity of West Linton, but this no doubt simply due to the fact that local
antiquaries such as Adam Sim of Culter, who formed a large collection of relics from Lanark-
shire and Peeblesshire during the middle of last century, tended to concentrate their attention
upon that region.

3. THE BRONZE AGE (FIG. I)

The arrival of the earliest peoples using copper or bronze at the beginning of the second
millennium B.C. is marked by a radical change in burial practice, the Neolithic tradition of

1 Lacaille, A. D., The Stone Age in Scotland, 161, fig. 58.
2 P.P.S., xxi (1955), 14.
3 Piggott, S., The Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles, 270.

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