In last month’s column, I explored Palaeolithic important prehistoric sites not just in Britain but in the whole of western Europe. Here I will follow up on that review by moving south into Kent and Sussex. A series of discoveries made in these counties has further enriched our knowledge of the deep past of what were to become the British Isles, and played a crucial part in the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project of 2001-2011, which transformed our understanding of this period (see CA 190, February 2004).
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE MARSHES
The North Kent coast does not have the best reputation. Its windswept marshes are where young Pip has his first, terrifying encounter with the convict Abel Magwitch in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and their popular image as badlands remains. More recently, roads and railways have dissected them, and industry blighted them. Few of the visitors to the nearby Bluewater Retail Park, however, realise they are shopping a stone’s throw from some of the oldest and most impressive prehistoric sites in Britain.
At the former Barnfield Pit quarry, on the north-west edge of the village of Swanscombe (halfway between Dartford and Gravesend), fieldwork undertaken in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1960-1970s revealed evidence of activity dating back as much as 400,000 years, including fossilised human remains, handaxes and other artefacts, and plentiful animal bones, some of which showed evidence of butchery. These finds make the site of comparable importance to Happisburgh and Pakefield, locations that we explored last month. CA 113 (February 1989) first explained Swanscombe’s significance when it published a survey of the state of knowledge of the British Palaeolithic at that time by John Wymer (1928-2006). By that point in his career, he was a distinguished academic, but Wymer had first come to prominence in the 1950s, when still an amateur archaeologist, after he discovered the third piece of the 400,000-year-old Swanscombe skull. Originally (and incorrectly) named Swanscombe Man, but later found to have belonged to a young woman, this skull was a specimen of Homo heidelbergensis, an early Neanderthal or pre-Neanderthal. CA 190 (February 2004) saw the magazine’s next visit to this location, bringing Wymer’s analyses up to date with comparison to more recent sites and finds, including at Boxgrove – more on which below. CA 196 (March 2005) revisited Swanscombe after the quarry had been transformed into a heritage park and nature reserve (see details at the end of this article), and CA 288 (March 2014) returned in another state-of-the-nation review a decade later, in light of renewed finds at Happisburgh. Most recently, in conjunction with the publication of her book Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death, and art, Rebecca Wragg Sykes placed the human remains from Swanscombe in both a wider and more intimate context in CA 372 (March 2021), offering insights into the lives of our closest hominin relatives and the world they inhabited. It is far from the stereotyped misperception of them as being somehow less capable than us and their experiences less emotionally rich than ours. Wragg Sykes paints a deeply emotive picture of innovative and creative communities comfortable in their landscapes and confident in their abilities.
Further evidence for the social complexity of Neanderthals in this area comes from finds made around the nearby Dartford Crossing, explored in CA 247 (October 2010). Fieldwork associated with improvements to the M25/A2 junction between 2003 and 2006 identified evidence there for Neanderthal occupation early in the last glaciation (115,000 to 10,000 years ago), a period when, it was long thought, Britain had been deserted, with hominin populations only living further south in what became modern-day France. The finds described above completely changed this perception. CA 193 (August 2004) and CA 284 (November 2013) dug further into the Neanderthal communities of North Kent around Southfleet Road in Swanscombe/Ebbsfleet. There, archaeological work in advance of the High Speed 1 (HS1) rail route on the south-eastern edge of the village identified a well-preserved Neanderthal hunting/butchery site. The rich fossil palaeoenvironmental remains from the site paint a vivid picture of a lush, wooded valley containing a swamp where hominins preyed on the gigantic straight-tusked elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus over 400,000 years ago. These were distinct from both prehistoric mammoths and modern-day elephants, being more than twice the size of the largest modern-day African elephants, with mature bulls on average having a shoulder height of 4m (13ft) and a weight of 13 tonnes (29,000lbs). Think of these majestic animals roaming the landscape the next time you are stuck in a traffic jam on the M25 (they would have been around the same height as the HGVs sitting alongside you on the road).
On the subject of the road network, spare a thought, too, for a final site of Palaeolithic importance a few miles further east along the A2 at Cuxton, on the north bank of the Medway near Rochester. CA 105 (July 1987) reported on fieldwork there from the 1960s onwards, which in its time was among the most significant in the country. Overall, this short section of land between Dartford in the west and Rochester in the east – around 12 miles as the elephant marches – is home to a stunning array of sites and finds that have revealed much about hominin settlement in the deep past.
SOMETHING BIG IN BOXGROVE
When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Southampton in the mid-1990s, the name Boxgrove was frequently mentioned with envy: this was the site where prehistory was literally being rewritten – and by a team from our rivals at University College London. Discovered in 1974, and excavated between 1982 and 1996 by a team led by Mark Roberts, the former Eartham quarry site lies a few miles to the north-east of Chichester in West Sussex and is situated in an area that features a buried chalk cliff that overlooked a flat beach (which contained a waterhole), stretching approximately 1km south to the sea. John Wymer’s review of the British Palaeolithic in CA 113 (February 1989) was the magazine’s first foray there, but it was in the 1990s that the site really hit the headlines, both in the specialist and popular press. CA 138 and CA 143 (April 1994 and June 1995) reported on claims of the discovery of the ‘oldest European’ there in 1993, at the time that the remains of an archaic human (provisionally thought to be a member of the Homo heidelbergensis sub-species) were found, comprising the partial tibia of a human who probably stood 1.8m (5ft 11in) tall and weighed approximately 80kg (12.6 stone). In 1995, two incisor teeth from another individual hominid were found, and so CA 153 (July 1997) followed up with a site report to tell this fascinating story in full. This article is well worth reading in its entirety in Current Archaeology’s online archive, as it gives such an evocative account of the site and its finds, especially if read in conjunction with Fairweather Eden: life in Britain half a million years ago, a book that was reviewed in CA 174 (June 2001).
News from Boxgrove then went quiet, the fieldwork long over, the fieldworkers dispersed to other sites. Only in the early 2000s did the name re-enter popular circulation (although it had never gone away among the small, specialist community of Palaeolithic archaeologists). As I mentioned in my introduction, the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project of 2001-2011 revolutionised our understanding of this period and, indeed, this site, as was outlined not only in CA 190 but again in CA 210 (July 2007). The finds at Happisburgh and Pakefield then prompted further reassessments of Boxgrove, as the date of the oldest humans found in Britain was pushed back by hundreds of thousands of years (see CA 201, January 2006, and CA 288, March 2014). But the magazine’s most recent visit to this site is a reminder of just how important it remains: CA 373 (April 2021) reviewed a book describing its evidence for horse butchery, putting the lives of its hominin hunters into sharp focus. Boxgrove really was an extraordinary location in the past as well as the present.
Swanscombe is now an open-access heritage park and nature reserve: see www.swanscombeheritagepark.co.uk. The other sites mentioned in this column are not open to the public and nothing of the excavations is visible.
