These preservation advantages mean that cave sites are disproportionately represented in the archaeological record of the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods. They are not the only sites occupied — Mesolithic people in Britain used open-air camps extensively — but they are the sites most likely to preserve evidence, so they dominate what we know about the period.
The broader pattern of Mesolithic activity in Somerset and the surrounding region includes multiple other known sites. The Sweet Track in the Somerset Levels — a raised wooden trackway across a former wetland — dates from around 3800 BCE, the Neolithic, and is one of the oldest known engineered wooden roads in the world. Earlier Mesolithic material from the levels suggests that the wetland environment was actively used by hunter-gatherer communities before the Neolithic farmers who built the trackway arrived. The rich food resources of wetland environments — waterfowl, fish, shellfish, aquatic plants — made them productive territories for mobile hunter-gatherers.
The Cheddar Gorge itself, with its vertical cliff faces and dramatic scenery, would have been a distinctive landmark in the Mesolithic landscape. Whether it held any particular significance beyond its practical usefulness as shelter and a source of water and flint is unknown. The physical drama of the gorge — the towering walls, the sound of the river, the unusual light conditions inside the cave system — might reasonably be imagined to have made it a memorable and perhaps significant place to the people who used it, but this is speculation without archaeological corroboration.
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## The Discovery in Context: Early Twentieth-Century Archaeology and Its Assumptions