Hunters' remains earliest knownScotland's foremost amateur archaeologist, Tam Ward of Biggar Archaeology Group, was guest speaker at the November meeting of Lanark and District Archaeological Society.
by George Topp
Nov 19 2009
The subject of Tam's talk was about the excavation work at Howburn Farm, near Elsrickle, which turned out to be the most important dig in Scotland this year.
Tam related how the site had been discovered through diligent field walking. Initially, Tam thought the site was early Neolithic but a talk with an expert in pre-history revealed the amazing fact that some of the tools that Tam and his team had discovered were about 16,000 years old (later Paleolithic)... Tools fashioned by the people of the palaeolithic period in Scotland were similar to those produced in Denmark, Northern Germany and Holland. They came to Scotland chasing the herds of migrating reindeer and living off their meat and utilising their hides for clothing. No reindeer remains were found was due to the high acidity of the Scottish soil...
Tam also said that investigations of what would have been a nearby lake had not revealed any evidence of the vegetation of the period. Maybe the vegetation such as it was would be similar to the Tundra in Lapland and the landscape would be treeless. He also indicated the glaciers returned to the Howburn area and that accounted for some of the flints being buried in what appear to be natural soil.
Did he find any scozzafava? As far as I can tell, ‘scozzafava’ should mean ‘Scottish broad bean.’ I just knew you’d want to know that. ;-)