The British Isles have been continually settled since 12500 years ago when hunter-gatherer bands returned in the wake of the retreating ice sheets. For seven thousand years, until the introduction of farming, people subsisted by junting wild games and gathering the fruits of the forest and foreshore. In archaeolgical terms they belonged to the late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, and have hitherto, been studied mainly in terms of their stone tools. Today, in an age when there is growing concern over the relationship between human beings and a rapidly changing environment, an earlier period when this relationship was both intimate and immediate is of considerable interest. Late Stone Age Hunters of teh British Isles places the archaeological evidence - mainly stone tools and animal bones - within a wider, ecological context. The book examines aspects of the hunter-gatherer way of life and how it can be studied from archaeological evidence. There follows a review of environmental change in the period covered and three chapters of case studies in which different examples of hunter-gatherer activity are examined within their ecological context.
In a concluding study the temporal and spatial development of the settlement pattern as a whole is mapped, and summarized within the regional context.