Nuts Crack Date	Volume 54 Number 5, September/October 2001
by Alan Saville

Radiocarbon dating of burnt hazelnut shells excavated from a temporary campsite in Cramond, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Scotland, has firmly places the site at between 8500 and 8200 B.C. This makes Cramond the earliest dated settlement in Scotland. Archaeologists and volunteers at the site have also recovered the earliest so-called "Late Mesolithic" tool kit found in Great Britain, which includes triangle- and crescent-shaped microliths produced from bladelets struck from small platform cores.

© 2001 by the Archaeological Institute of America www.archaeology.org/0109/newsbriefs/date.html

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