While walking their dogs along a cliff-flanked Scottish beach after an intense storm, a couple stumbled upon a series of unusual markings on the damp ground — patterns that looked like ancient human and animal footprints.
Their discovery sparked an archaeological race against the clock to document and study the prints before they disappeared into the surf.
"It's very rare that you get involved in a genuine archaeological emergency where, if we didn't do it very, very quickly, the whole site would be gone," Kate Britton, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen, said in a video about the find.
On the beach at Lunan Bay in eastern Scotland, locals Ivor Campbell and Jenny Snedden — along with their dogs Ziggy and Juno — spotted a fresh layer of clay in the storm-damaged dunes with what appeared to be prints. They notified Aberdeenshire council archaeologist Bruce Mann, who brought in Britton and her team to excavate the newly uncovered site before it was lost forever.
The team of archaeologists worked in wind gusts up to 55 mph (88.5 km/h), racing to document the prints as the site was eroded with each high tide. They used drones, cameras and, later in the lab, 3D modeling software to record images of the archaeological site. They also used plaster to create molds of some of the better-preserved prints, which were made by barefoot humans and several animals, including red deer (Cervus elaphus) and roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), according to the statement.
"I'd never seen a site like this in Scotland," Britton said. "It was just immediately clear that this was something special."
Underneath the prints, the archaeologists found a layer of charred plant remains. They carbon-dated the plants to 2,000 years ago, during the late Iron Age.
"The late Iron Age dates are in keeping with what we know about the rich archaeology of nearby Lunan Valley," Gordon Noble, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen, said in the statement. "It's very exciting to think these prints were made by people around the time of the Roman invasions of Scotland and in the centuries leading up to the emergence of the Picts."
The Lunan Bay site "tells us how this now sandy beach was once a muddy estuary and that humans were using this environment, perhaps for hunting deer or to collect wild plant foods," William Mills, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen, said in the statement.
Britton and her team excavated the site for two days, recording as much as they could. When they returned a week later, the prints were completely gone.
"Footprints that represent actions of people over minutes, thousands of years ago, were destroyed within days," Britton said.
Although the Lunan Bay site is unique in Scotland, Britton said, "what it does mean for us now is there could be potentially other sites like this out there."
