Archaeology
Worked chert from the Greasby site that was brought from North Wales.
The earliest known human settlement in Merseyside has been found at Greasby, Wirral. It dates from approximately 7000 BC. National Museums Liverpool archaeologists excavated the site between 1987 and 1990. The site was found during a programme of fieldwalking.
The site was probably a base camp belonging to a family, or several families of hunter-gatherers during the Mesolithic period. These people lived by hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants, nuts and berries. However, only burnt hazelnuts had survived on the site.
As well as base camps like the Greasby site, these people would have had several smaller camps around the region. These would have been overnight camps for hunters, sites where animals were killed and butchered and hunting stands.
At Greasby there is archaeological evidence for the mobile nature of their lives. Nearly all the tools are made of chert, a type of stone which only occurs naturally in this region in north Wales and the southern Pennines. This means that these people must have spent part of the year in north Wales. Perhaps a hunting expedition brought the stone back with them to their base camps. The sea-level at that time was much lower than it is today so it was easier to cross the River Dee into north Wales.
The evidence at Greasby consisted of a hearth or fireplace and a series of pits which may have been used for storing food and later rubbish disposal. In one small pit, under some pebbles at the bottom, we found a little group of pre-shaped stone pieces. These were ready to be made into arrowheads, or microliths. There were many different types of stone tools. They could have been used for activities such as food preparation, bone/wood working or hunting. One small area may have been associated with an episode of stone working, probably by a specialist flint knapper. There was also a square area of packed stone pebbles which may have been the basis of a working area, perhaps for the preparation of food or other materials. The evidence suggests that people might have stayed here for several months at a time.
Although there are many such sites on a low sandstone hill in Greasby, this is the only one that has been excavated. Prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups must have returned time and again to this same area perhaps over hundreds of years. The place may have had a special meaning to them. Several miles away, at Thurstaston, overlooking the present Dee estuary, there is an even denser concentration of stone tools. This represents another important area for similar occupation episodes of this period.