The earliest occupation of the site
In 1999, we found what was very clearly a Creswell Point. These artefacts are very closely datable to the period c 12,800 to 12,000 Cal BC and were made by the first people to return to Britain at the end of the last glaciation. A few other artefacts seem to belong to this very remote period: in 1998, close to where we found the Creswell Point, a pointed blade was found, and this was made from the same type of high quality bluish-white flint. The Mesolithic artefacts, by contrast, are almost all made from cherts, while the flint types are on yellowish pebbles, some of which may derive from glacial drift deposits.
These are the first Upper Palaeolithic artefacts to be found in situ in Cheshire. This makes it difficult to put them into any sort of context. Most artefacts belonging to this tradition (the so-called ‘Creswellian’) have been found in the Peak District, South Wales and Southwest England. The people who used these tools were highly mobile, as can be seen in Southwest England, where the source of flint was in the upper Thames Valley, but the flints themselves were lost up to a hundred kilometres away. At a date as early as this, trading contacts seem unlikely and it is more probable that people collected the flint themselves and then discarded the tools elsewhere.
What life was like for these early inhabitants of the site is difficult to guess. Evidence for the Upper Palaeolithic in Britain is found at places as far north and west as Kirkhead Cave (Lancs.), Victoria Cave in Settle (North Yorks.) and Kendrick’s Cave on the Great Orme (North Wales). The size of a Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer group is difficult to judge, but 25 is regarded as a minimum breeding population for human groups. The economy was based on hunting animals and gathering wild plant foods. Evidence for the consumption of plant foods is almost non-existent. Ethnographic parallels with modern hunter-gatherer communities have been taken to show that the colder the climate, the greater the reliance on meat. There are sound biological and economic reasons for this, not least in the ready availability of large amounts of fat in arctic mammals. From this, it has been deduced that the humans of the glacials were primarily hunters, while plant foods were more important during the interglacials. By the late Upper Palaeolithic, the dominant food animals included reindeer, red deer, giant Irish elk and wild cattle (aurochs). Unfortunately, the soils at Carden are very acidic, so we do not have any surviving bone to show us what the cave’s inhabitants were hunting.
The Windermere Interstadial, in which Creswell Points were manufactured, was a time when the climate warmed rapidly, and was marked by a gradual colonisation of southeastern Britain by scattered birch woodland. This compares with insect evidence, which shows that average summer temperatures right at the start of this phase were at least as high as in the post-glacial period. This warm phase was followed by a very brief cold snap, lasting perhaps only 500 years, but which saw a readvance of ice in northern Scotland and the return of tundra conditions to Britain as a whole. Sites containing peat deposits that can be dated to the late glacial are commonest in southeast Cheshire and there are few such deposits close to Carden, with only the two small basin mires at Beeston containing any deposits of this period. They show a typical sequence of late-glacial vegetation, moving from open grassland with a little birch to open birch woodland and back to grass. This shows that our hunters would have been travelling through an open landscape, the cliffs at Carden providing a convenient point from which to watch herds of animals moving through the low-lying land to the west.