The site in question was a small mesolithic site, discovered in the summer of 1996 by Headland Archaeology Ltd during a watching brief for the construction of a new golf course just to the north of Crail, on the coast of Fife, Scotland. It was felt to be important for several reasons. Firstly, the radiocarbon samples provided some of the earliest dates for human activity in Scotland, in the early ninth millennium. Secondly, it was a particularly small site, which is rare for the Scottish mesolithic, and the radiocarbon samples suggested that activity on site took place over a short period of time. Thirdly, the lithic assemblage was entirely of flint, which is exceptional in mesolithic Scotland, and, while it contained the usual run-of-the-mill scrapers and edge retouched pieces, the microliths were dominated by crescents, and this was not at all common. The site was interpreted as a specialised, small-scale processing site, something that is rare in the mesolithic record for Scotland.
It was clear that the site merited publication to as wide an audience as possible. The initial plans for funding had included provision that it be published in the Tayside and Fife Archaeological Journal, and this would of course go ahead, but perhaps something more widely circulated could be arranged. At this point, having recently seen Internet Archaeology on the Web, I suggested that we approach the editors to see whether they might be interested. Naively, I thought that Web publication was much the same as paper publication: all we would have to do was produce the word-processed text, as for our paper publication, modify it slightly, stick in a few hypertext links for key words, and there you were. Well, the principal was there but the practice was quite different and over the next few months I found that I had embarked on a steep learning curve.
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URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue7/wickham/site.html
Last updated: Mon Sept 6 1999