On Sunday 22nd August, an intrepid party of Living Levels volunteers set off on an expedition across the saltmarsh and mudflats at Uskmouth looking for evidence of prehistoric cattle. The group was supported by Living Levels Community Engagement Officer Gavin Jones and archaeologists from the University of Reading and the University of the Highlands and Islands (Orkney).
Conditions on the saltmarsh and mud flats were challenging and this is certainly not a place to venture unguided. The group were looking for the bones of aurochs, an extinct, much larger, ancestor of the domestic cow, in a palaeochannel (a former river or stream bed) where they had been found on several previous occasions.
The participants were rewarded by the discovery of at least 10 aurochs bones, mostly vertebrae. They anticipate that these bones date to the Neolithic or New Stone Age (4000 - 1700 BCE); the aurochs became extinct in Britain in the middle Bronze Age (2500 - 800 BCE. The precise position of each bone was recorded by differential GPS so that they can be related to past and future finds.
Particularly exciting was the discovery of 4 aurochs footprints in an earlier peat deposit which had been cut through by the former channel containing the bones. They were able to make dental alginate casts of two of the footprints and from these we have now made more permanent plaster of Paris casts, one of which will be given to the Newport Wetlands visitor centre for display. During the visit the history of archaeological discoveries at Uskmouth was outlined; these included the finding by the late Derek Upton of Mesolithic human footprints, and an antler mattock, and areas covered by deer and bird footprints.
The Living Levels visit contributed to a developing picture of the archaeology of Uskmouth which has been gradually built up since Derek Upton’s pioneering discoveries of the mid-1980s. Whilst the team was busy on the foreshore Dr Jennifer Foster held a pop up display on the Wales Coastal path nearby on the Wetland Reserve explaining to about 50 visitors to the reserve what the team was doing, showing some of the aurochs bones from Uskmouth and plaster casts of human and bird footprints from previous work at Goldcliff.
Martin Bell and Tom Walker
Reading University
Auroch’s vertebrae (Martin Bell)