Ghosts in the Landscape: Challenges and Opportunities in the Search for Scotland’s Palaeolithic People

摘要: Cave palaeontology and Palaeolithic archaeology have been the subject of great public and scholarly interest since the 1800s, including in Scotland. It was in Aberdeen that geologist Charles Lyell delivered his landmark paper defending the'Antiquity of Man'hypothesis. Despite this early impetus, 19th century scholarship also saw the beginnings of a research paradigm in the United Kingdom (and Ireland) that persistently excluded the possibility of human life in all but the south-east of Britain during the Late Pleistocene. Whether due to continued perceptions of environmental hostility, the side-lining of early proponents of a Scottish Upper Palaeolithic, or emphasis on other foci in Scottish prehistoric research, the evidence for the earliest human habitation in this country has long been contested or simply overlooked. Indeed, the last two decades have seen the region excluded from several largescale, well-funded projects re-examining human activity in Pleistocene Britain/north-west Europe. Many of Scotland’s earliest examples of stone tools–despite similarities to Late Glacial/Late Upper Palaeolithic assemblages in continental Europe–were until recently labelled ‘Mesolithic’by most researchers.The recent recognition of unequivocally Upper Palaeolithic artefacts has thrown down the gauntlet for the study of Late Pleistocene life in Scotland. One new site in particular–that of the Late Hamburgian reindeer hunting camp at Howburn, South Lanarkshire–marked a major milestone, demonstrating clear cultural connections to other parts of northern Europe around 12,000 BC (eg, northern Germany, southern Scandinavia). Finds from another site …