By Alison Campsie
Traces of Scotland's earliest residents who lived 10,000 years ago have been found on a new housing development.
The signs of life have been found on land at Guardbridge in Fife close to the River Eden.
It has attracted people since hunter-gatherers roamed the area during the Late Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods, stopping to build fires and knap their flints.
The site continued to attract human activity over the millennia, with evidence of Neolithic farmers, Bronze Age weavers and jewelers and Iron Age fort dwellers also emerging.
Today, people have moved on to the land to take up residence in a mix of two and three-bedroom homes, with up to 335 houses to be built over time.
James MacKay, Managing Director of Persimmon Homes North Scotland, which built the most recent housing on the site, said: "When Fife Council approved the development of houses on land at Guardbridge, no one imagined the process would reveal such remarkable archaeological discoveries.
"Many current residents here may not have imagined that where they now live, so too did many people over the entire duration of Scotland's prehistory.
"The building of houses at this site has provided an inadvertent but invaluable opportunity to learn more about how people in Fife lived during prehistory."
The discoveries have been confirmed by GUARD Archaeology, which excavated the site between 2017 and 2021, with the results now published in two new publications.
Maureen Kilpatrick, who directed the excavations, said: "We really didn't expect to find the whole prehistory of Fife in one field."
Excavations began at a fort in the north-east corner of the site, which had already been identified on aerial photographs, and which would have overlooked the Eden Estuary.
While most of this fort was left intact, the excavation revealed that the structure likely originated during the Late Bronze Age and continued through much of the Iron Age until the early centuries AD.
Spindle whorls and loom weights indicated weaving of woolen cloth at the fort, while fragments of shale bracelets demonstrated the love for personal adornment. Iron Age houses were also found outwith the perimeter of the fort.
Kilpatrick added: "What was really surprising about this site was all the other archaeology we found outwith the fort, not just Iron Age but much earlier too.
"The remains of substantial Bronze Age roundhouses were discovered, from which an assemblage of pottery sherds and animal bones were recovered.
"Evidence of metalworking, including rare casting molds for a sword blade and a socketed gouge - a tool used in carpentry - were found.
Co-author Thomas Muir added: "The archaeological evidence gathered at Guardbridge demonstrates that the site was occupied for almost all of the Bronze Age period, between 2200 and 800 BC.
"'The occupants crafted intricate metalwork and processed wool into yarn.
"From the porch of one of the roundhouses was found evidence that one of its occupants had once sat there knapping flint for tools.'
Earlier, Neolithic farmers of Fife left many pits across this site, which contained burnt cereal grains, saddle querns and pottery sherds. No traces of their homes were found.
And earlier still, traces of a temporary Mesolithic campsite, including a fire pit dated to around 4320 - 4051 BC, was also discovered.
The fire-pit has been linked to a cluster of burnt lithics arranged in a distinctive star-shaped pattern, indicative of a tent or shelter, where a small group of hunter-gatherers once camped to hunt and fish in the nearby estuary."
Below this was a scatter of flints from around 10,000 BC during the Late Upper Paleolithic period, where some of the very earliest inhabitants of Fife once sat knapping flint tools.