7 EXCAVATIONS AT BLICK MEAD, VESPASIAN’S CAMP, AMESBURY A spring at Blick Mead, Vespasian’s Camp, close to Stonehenge, has preserved substantial Mesolithic deposits, which potentially transform our understanding of the pre-Stonehenge landscape and the establishment of its later ritual character. This report outlines the recent discoveries and concludes with a review of the site and its wider significance. Mesolithic settlement near Stonehenge: excavations at Blick Mead, Vespasian’s Camp, Amesbury by David Jacques 1 and Tom Phillips 2 with contributions by Peter Hoare, 3 Barry Bishop, 4 Tony Legge † 5 and Simon Parfitt 6 Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine, vol. 107 (2014), pp. 7–27 1 Senior Research Fellow in Archaeology University of Buckingham:david.Jacques@buckingham.ac.uk; 2 Oxford Archaeology: tom.phillips@thehumanjourney.net; 3 Associate Member AHOB 3: pgh@ventifact.co.uk; 4 Lithics Studies Society: bvfj@tinyworld.co.uk; 5 University of Cambridge; 6 Natural History Museum and Institute of Archaeology, UCL: s.parfitt@nhm.ac.uk Introduction Evidence for Mesolithic activity in the Stonehenge landscape is both rare and neglected and limited either to the publication of discrete assemblages of material found as by-products of other projects (Leivers and Moore 2008, 14-19; Parker Pearson 2012, 230, 236), or summaries of find spots in the area (Darvill 2005, 62-67; Lawson 2006, 26-36). The discovery of a potentially nationally important Mesolithic settlement at Blick Mead, in the northeast corner of Vespasian’s Camp, Amesbury, Wiltshire (NGR SU146417), c. 2km east of Stonehenge, provides new insights into Mesolithic society in this part of Wiltshire and in Britain more generally. This locale shows many of the characteristics of a periodically occupied ‘persistent place’ (Barton et al. 1995, 81-82). Visited over a period of nearly 3000 years, recent excavations have provided evidence of the communities who built the first monuments at Stonehenge between the 9th-7th millennia BC, and for Mesolithic use of the area continuing into the 5th millennium BC and the dawn of the Neolithic period. Two radiocarbon dates of the 5th millennium BC are the only such dates recovered from the Stonehenge landscape and fill a crucial gap in the occupational sequence for the Stonehenge area at this time as ‘Nowhere in the sequence is the Atlantic (late Mesolithic) represented’ (Allen 1995, 55 and 471). The Blick Mead radiocarbon dates include every millennium in the range and present the longest sequence of any Mesolithic site nationally (Table 1). This aspect provokes a series of questions about the extent of Mesolithic activity in the vicinity before the creation of the Stonehenge ritual landscape. Of particular interest is whether the Neolithic and later monuments reflect earlier activity at Blick Mead and in its surroundings.