Burren Archaeology Mesolithic

According to most palynological studies from the Burren, the Mesolithic landscape would have been one dominated by pine woodland with an understory of hazel (Corylus avelanna). Other species which would have been present include yew (Taxus bacatta), oak (Quercus spp.), elm (Ulmus spp.), ash (Fraxinus excelsior) and alder (Alnus spp.).  Some more open sites with a herbaceous vegetation would also have existed.

Little is known about the presence or extent of early Mesolithic settlements in the Burren, as scant evidence from this era has survived. This is hardly surprising considering that such a hunter-gatherer economy as practised by Mesolithic settlers would probably have supported only a couple of small hunting communities, possibly no more than one or two dozen people, in an area the size of the Burren.

Settlement locations along natural boundaries such as water bodies (the distribution of which may well have been very different from that seen today) would have been preferred, and it is likely that their environmental impact would constitute little more than a minor local factor in the changes that occur in the pollen diagrams of this time.

One example of such an impact might be the appearance of bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) and the expansion of hazel, both associated with regeneration after clearance by fire, in a pollen diagram from Loch Dá Éan in the south-east Burren (Feighan, 1985). In general however, according to authors such as D’Arcy (1995), ‘Palaeobotanical studies have revealed little which might be interpreted as widespread grazing modification until the final stages of the Stone Age’.

Thus, while the question of Mesolithic interference with the environment remains an unconfirmed possibility, it was later, in the Neolithic period, with the development of agriculture, that human impact became really significant.