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In search of the earliest traces of mankind
Elveden, Suffolk
6 February 2000
Mick Aston describes it as one of the oddest Time Team locations he's worked at. 'By day we'd be rooting about in this ancient clay and mud and looking for traces of our ancestors from 400,000 years ago, and then in the evening we'd all go back to this Center Parcs holiday camp in the middle of the forest. Very strange.'
Whether or not it was the oddest, it was certainly the oldest site that Time Team has ever excavated. It was also one of the rarest. Sites showing evidence of human activity dating back 400,000 years are so uncommon in this country that the only way that Time Team was able to become involved in investigating one was by joining an established British Museum excavation. Nick Ashton, a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the British Museum, was pleased to invite the Team to bring in their expertise and resources to help out on his ongoing project at Elveden, near Thetford in Suffolk.
The excavation centred on two sites. The main one, on land belonging to the Center Parcs camp at Elveden (OS Landranger 144, grid ref 810805), took place in an old Victorian claypit, which had originally been dug out for brick-making. A secondary one, in another claypit five miles away at Barnham (grid ref 875790), involved reopening a previous British Museum excavation site, which had last been excavated five years before.
The diggers were not looking for human remains. Only six finds of human bones have ever been made from the Palaeolithic period – the Old Stone Age – in England. These consist of three pieces of skull found on one site and two teeth and a leg bone discovered on another. The famous 'Clacton spear', moreover, so named after its discovery at Clacton-on-Sea in 1911 and dated to around 450,000 years ago, is not only the oldest wooden object ever found in Britain; it is also the only one dating from this period. Most organic matter deriving from our human ancestors simply has not survived for that length of time.
Cartoon by Victor Ambrus.
View bigger drawing
Victor Ambrus's sketch shows the Palaeolithic river valley where Time Team were excavating at Elveden as it might have looked at the time that our ancestors were knapping flints on a cobbled beach 400,000 years ago.
View bigger drawing
The evidence for human occupation from such a long time ago depends rather upon longer lasting, non-organic objects: stone tools and the flakes that are left behind in the course of their creation from larger pieces of flint. The process of shaping a piece of flint to create a workable tool is known as flint knapping, and at both Elveden and Barnham there have been many finds arising from this process made on what would, in Palaeolithic times, have been the bank of a prehistoric river.
Indeed, in one area of the site at Elveden, the artefacts were totally undisturbed, lying exactly where they were left 400,000 years ago. It is even possible, based on the distribution of waste material, to work out exactly where one person was sitting while working on the flint. And some of the flakes from this Palaeolithic flint knapper's work can actually be reassembled to reconstitute the original flint nodule from which they were knapped.
Flint tools are often referred to as the 'Swiss army knives' of the Palaeolithic era. Hand axes were created for the tougher tasks, such as cutting trees or branches. Smaller, sharp-edged flints were used for cutting or scraping; others were used for boring. And the first flint tool to emerge at Elveden was a spokeshave – a type of plane – that would have been used for stripping the bark and sharpening wooden implements, such as the spear that Phil and flint technology expert John Lord were to make for this programme.
The 'vole clock'
As well as helping Nick Ashton with his excavations, the Team also brought in Simon Parfitt and Andy Currant. Andy is an expert palaeontologist from the Natural History Museum. Simon is also based there, where he works for the Boxgrove Project, which is run through the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. They were looking for animal remains in the excavated sediments – and particularly for vole teeth because of their usefulness as a dating tool. Simon and Andy referred to this as the 'vole clock', a surprisingly accurate way of dating sediments because of the way in which these tiny creatures changed over time.
The two of them carried out a seemingly bizarre research practice. This consisted of filling some 60 buckets with clay-packed deposits from the most promising sediments, adding water and hydrogen peroxide, and then waiting overnight for the mixture to dissolve the clay, leaving the organic material to be removed by sieving. Except that it didn't quite work out like that. The clay was so tightly packed that they really needed longer for the mixture to do its work, so they turned to pickling vinegar to try to speed up the process. This seemed to help, but the organic finds were sparse: a tooth of a tench and a pike, an amphibian bone from a frog or toad, and a few rodent bones – unfortunately not sufficient for accurate dating purposes. The vole clock couldn't tell us the time on this occasion.
Read Andy Currant on how the 'vole clock' works.
The Palaeolithic river
Greater success was achieved with the efforts of John Gater and his geophysics survey work, together with Stewart Ainsworth's evaluation of the landscape and how it might have looked in Palaeolithic times. The period from which the finds at Elveden date was during the Hoxnian 'interglacial', around 427,000 to 364,000 years ago. This was one of a series of warmer periods between the 'ice ages' with which our ancestors had to contend, following the Anglian glacial epoch of 474,000 to 427,000 years ago (the 'mother of all glaciations', according to Phil). By the time of the flint knappers working on our Palaeolithic river bank, this area would have been covered in lush vegetation. Lions, rhinos, elephants, pond terrapins, tree frogs and other exotic animals would have been commonplace.
John and Stewart were set the task of trying to discover if the river that ran through the site at Elveden was the same one that also ran through the site at Barnham. (In both cases, the great majority of finds had been discovered on cobble 'beaches' by the side of ancient waterways.) John Gater employed a technique using electrical imaging to try to identify prehistoric watercourses. This involved running a cable with probes going into the ground every five metres to obtain a linear image of what lay below the ground. The results from Elveden clearly showed an ancient watercourse heading off eastwards from the excavation site in the direction of the site at Barnham.
Stewart's fieldwalking, meanwhile, had identified a 'brown streak' in a farmer's field at Barnham, which he felt could be evidence of the same sort of clay deposits found alongside the Palaeolithic river at Elveden. A further electrical imaging survey confirmed that here too was a prehistoric watercourse draining in a west-east direction. By plotting the sites of flint tool-making identified in the area, it was shown that these all followed the same west-east trajectory, and that there may have been not one but several, possibly interlinked watercourses draining in that direction. It seemed probable that the riverbank the Team was helping to excavate at Elveden was alongside the same river that ran through the site at Barnham.
By the end of the three days, then, the Team had added significantly to our knowledge of these rare and important sites. At Elveden, where more than 200 flint flakes were discovered along with flint chips and cores, two distinct layers of human activity were revealed for the first time. And the three tools found there during the period of Time Team's involvement – the spokeshave, a notched flint that may have been used as a spokeshave and a scraper – were a humbling reminder of the skills and ingenuity that our prehistoric ancestors brought to bear in what would have been a difficult and dangerous environment.
Quiz
Resources
Further reading
Prehistoric Europe, edited by Barry Cunliffe (Oxford University Press, 1994) paperback £13.99
The best overview of prehistoric Europe available. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field, but the authors have all worked together to provide a seamless history of Europe from 700,000 years ago to 700 AD. Many colour and black-and-white photographs.
Stone Age Britain by Nicholas Barton (English Heritage/Batsford, 1997) paperback £15.99
Excellent, up-to-date introduction to major themes in Palaeolithic studies, such as the reconstruction of past environments, the peopling of Britain and the development of symbolic expression. Well illustrated and readable.
Studies in the Upper Palaeolithic of Britain and Northwest Europe by Derek A Roe (British Archaeological Reports, 1986) paperback £22
Intended for a mainly academic audience, but worth seeking out for anyone with a detailed interest in the period.
In addition, the following books are currently (February 2000) on special offer from the specialist archaeological booksellers, Oxbow Books (Park End Place, Oxford OX1 1HN, tel 01865 241249, e-mail: oxbow@oxbowbooks.com):
Ape Man: The Story of Human Evolution by R Caird (Boxtree 1994) hardback £19.99 Oxbow price £9.95
Lively exploration of current thinking, and history of the main events in the study of human origins.
The Emergence of Modern Humans edited by P Mellars (Edinburgh University Press, 1990) hardback £55, now reduced to £19.95
Papers discussing the archaeological evidence from Europe, Asia, Australasia and Africa.
Fairweather Eden by Michael Pitts and Mark Roberts (Century, 1997) hardback £17.99, reduced to £8.95
An account of over ten years of excavations at Boxgrove concentrating on the discovery of 'Boxgrove Man'.
The Fossil Trail by Ian Tattersall (Oxford University Press, 1995) hardback £18.99, reduced to £5.95
A sweeping tour of the study of human evolution. 'This superb book is a must for everyone interested in understanding the human story' – Don Johanson.
Hengistbury Head Dorset: Volume 2 by R N E Barton (OUCA, 1992) hardback £38, reduced to £19.95
Examines stratigraphy, faunal remains and the tool assemblage from the late Upper Palaeolithic and early Mesolithic sites.
Images of the Pastedited by N Roymans (Amsterdam University Press, 1991) hardback £56.00 reduced to £17.95
Seven lengthy papers on prehistoric societies in North-Western Europe.
The Neanderthal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins by James Shreeve (Viking, 1996) paperback reduced to £4.95
'Like sitting down with a wonderful storyteller in the cave where stories began' – Jonathan Weiner. Fossil evidence for human origins interwoven with personal evaluation.
Palaeolithic of Britain and its Nearest Neighbours
edited by S N Collcutt (Sheffield, 1986) paperback reduced to £6.95
Some 25 papers on recent research; lots of evidence.
Star Carr Revisited by A J Legge and P A Rowley-Conwy (Birkbeck College, UCL, 1988) paperback reduced to £6.50
Re-analysis of this important Mesolithic site.
Websites
See Miscellaneous archaeology websites by subject
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