Burrowing rabbits dig up 9,000-year-old artifacts on Welsh island
Burrowing rabbits are to blame for the discovery of ancient artifacts on a remote island by archaeologists in Wales.
Wardens on Skokholm Island, a wildlife preserve two miles off the Pembrokeshire coast, discovered a smooth stone tool near their cottage by a rabbit hole.
The ‘bevelled pebble,’ which was used to skin seals, dates from the Late Mesolithic period, about 9,000 years ago, and is the first evidence of Stone Age inhabitants on the island, according to experts.
The next day, the wardens found pottery fragments kicked up by the same rabbits that came from a funeral urn buried nearly 4,000 years ago.
Archaeologists believe the site was an Early Bronze burial mound built over a Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherer site that had been ‘disturbed by rabbits.’
Giselle Eagle and Richard Brown have lived alone on Skokholm since 2014, when they were hired as wardens by the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales.
The island is famous for the tens of thousands of seabirds that nest there, including puffins, ducks, Manx shearwaters and storm petrels.
It was set up in the 1930s as the first bird observatory in the UK.
Nearby Skomer Island is better known for archaeology, including stone walls and remains of round houses from the Iron Age and megaliths dating back to Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.
But, earlier this month, Eagle and Brown picked up a smooth rectangular stone from a rabbit hole in the shelter of a rock outcrop near their cottage.
Suspecting it was manmade, they sent images to researchers, who confirmed it was a Late Mesolithic tool dating from between 6,000 and 9,000 years ago.
Known as a ‘bevelled pebble,’ the tool would have been used by hunter-gatherers to make seal skin-clad boats or for processing shellfish and other foods, said Andrew David, an expert on stone tools who has directed excavations on Mesolithic sites in Pembrokeshire.
‘Although these types of tools are well known on coastal sites on mainland Pembrokeshire and Cornwall, as well into Scotland and northern France, this is the first example from Skokholm, and the first firm evidence for Late Mesolithic occupation on the island,’ said David.
‘To find an example on Skokholm is exciting,’ he said.
The same rabbit hole provided even more ancient bounty the following day, when Eagle and Brown spied another Mesolithic pebble tool and large pieces of pottery that had been unearthed by the burrowing bunnies.
Jody Deacon, a curator of prehistoric archaeology at the National Museum Wales recognized the clay fragments as part of an Early Bronze Age cremation urn.
Dating to between 2000 and 1750 BC, such funerary urns are not uncommon in west Wales but have never been found on Skokholm Island, or any of the western Pembrokeshire islands.
‘We know from past aerial surveys and airborne laser scanning by the Royal Commission that Skokholm has the remains of some prehistoric fields and settlements, though none has ever been excavated,’ said Toby Driver, an archaeologist with the Royal Commission Wales.
‘Thanks to the sharp eyes of the wardens we have the first confirmed Mesolithic tools and first Bronze Age pottery from Skokholm,’ he said.
Driver theorized the spot was an Early Bronze burial mound built over a Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherer site that had been ‘disturbed by rabbits.’
‘It’s a sheltered spot, where the island’s cottage now stands, and has clearly been settled for millennia.’
When the pandemic allows, Driver and his colleagues plan to visit Skokholm and uncover more ancient artifacts.