- The only site we have that could inform on the daily life and identity are from the Late Mesolithic after the late ninth millennium BC, no credible information other than inference from other regions can be afforded before this.
- Within this period we have no definitive graves or human remains recovered from South West Scotland. This denies us any information on the health, nutrition, demographics and genetics of the communities of the region and how this changed across this period. Evidence for how the individual members of these communities may have seen themselves is also lacking. Often, the way people treated their dead provides insights into social relations amongst the living, though it invariably says more about how the living viewed the dead, rather than how the deceased saw themselves. Further, it affords no ability to comment on burial rites and how these did, or did not reflect the lives of the individuals or their communities.
- Further, we are critically short of stratified deposits from settlement and industrial sites that contain rich environmental material or a diverse range of artefactual material. We are constrained by an artefactual record that is almost wholly lithic artefacts. This places research on this period in a position where there is almost no scope for commenting on health and mortality, disease and disability, childbirth and infancy, preparing and preserving food and drink, diet, identity, clothing, personal adornment, leisure, music, art and sport.
- The faintest exception to this is provided by West Challoch where the life of the individual can start to be discerned. Analysis of the lithic scatter deposition showed at least thirteen clusters of activity, showing multiple visits to this location. Further, a consistent pattern of behaviour was proposed of an initial knapping event on arrival followed by the erection of a windbreak shelter with a hearth to the fore. This immediate repair and renewal of the traveller’s tool kit before forming shelter and hearth may inform us as to the priorities of the community, or it may be a way of establishing a social or physical link to the revisited settlement location.
- Detailed analysis of the lithics recovered from West Challoch was able to discern evidence for the different discard patterns from left-handed or right-handed knappers. The deposition of ‘exotic’ pitchstone lithics within a pit was also considered as possible evidence of a ritual deposition of special objects.
- These observations on the practice of daily life at West Challoch are very limited, but they bring us close to recognising the presence of particular individuals in the past. However, it does not tell us how these people saw themselves or how they understood their place in the world. To date, surviving traces of activity and occupation have been too scant to allow substantial inferences regarding how space was organised and gendered within the dwelling-place, the settlement or even the wider landscape and environment.
- For these aspects of society, we are largely reliant on other regions of northwest Europe, inference and on analogy with modern, small-scale hunter-gatherer societies.