Sheila Duthie shares the experiences of the Mesolithic Deeside group who, for the past five years, have built up their expertise in fieldwalking and community archaeology, providing volunteer opportunities for people of all ages and levels of experience
Mesolithic Deeside was established in 2017 and is now well-established in making a major contribution to our understanding of human activity in the prehistoric period along the River Dee corridor.
The group’s origins
The group owes its existence to the work and enthusiasm of many who came before us. To explain, we must turn back the clock to the early 20th century when Hilda Patterson, who lived near Banchory, persevered in having her ‘pygmy’ flints recognised as being from the mesolithic period. The expert thinking at the time was that it was far too cold in Scotland after the last Ice Age for people to have survived.
Then in the 1970s another local resident, Dr John Grieve, a retired biochemist, collected hundreds of lithics and identified a number of lithic scatter sites both east and west of Banchory. James Kenworthy, archaeologist, excavated at Nethermills, Crathes, in 1978-81. And finally, between 2008 and 2012 NESARS (OFARS), a community archaeology group led by Heather Sabnis, concentrated on fieldwalking the Nethermills/Milton lithic scatter (see resources section).
James Kenworthy’s excavation from the 1970s had not been written up and, surprisingly, it was this that led to the creation of Mesolithic Deeside as the late Caroline Wickham-Jones, Mesolithic specialist, was funded to write up this excavation.
In connection with this publication, Caroline suggested a meeting and in May 2015 she met Heather Sabnis, Diane Collinson and myself, so that Caroline could share the story so far. Caroline knew that recent work at Chest of Dee in the Cairngorms had shown that there had been human activity there during the mesolithic.
There were known mesolithic sites on the Dee towards the coast. And that might have been it, except that Caroline suggested that it would be interesting and exciting to research the areas in between – that is the whole of the length of the River Dee, 140km (87 miles in old money!).
Vision becomes reality
Caroline Wickham-Jones was the visionary and the catalyst for the creation of Mesolithic Deeside and she organised a meeting at Aberdeen University of interested academics, professional archaeologists and community archaeologists in May 2016 to set the wheels in motion. This group became known as the Mesolithic Deeside Supergroup and is still
