Abstract/Summary

The Mesolithic period provides archaeologists with an opportunity to explore long-term processes of social and economic change, while also reconstructing the short-term activities of hunter-gatherers as they respond to their social and cultural environments. We address both time frames within this review of Mesolithic coastal exploitation in western Scotland. By collating 163 radiocarbon dates from 33 Mesolithic sites and analyzing these for activity events, we are able to monitor the variation in the intensity of activity between the Pleistocene/Holocene transition at c. 11 650 cal BP and the appearance of the Neolithic at c. 5800 cal BP. We attribute the majority of the variation to changes in population density arising from the impact of climate change. We then select a number of Mesolithic sites which had been especially favoured locations and explore the nature of the activities that were undertaken, and how these contributed to an overall pattern of coastal exploitation. To begin this review, we provide a brief introduction to the history of Mesolithic research in western Scotland, the character of the archaeological record and the methodology of activity event analysis