My lectures for the AAB (Archaeology of Ancient Britain) course got off into full swing this past fortnight with a fantastic demonstration of flint tool making from David Cranford of UNC and a canter through 98% of human history in the British Isles in 1 hour by yours truly.
I’ve found that one of the nicest things about teaching is that I have a great excuse to revisit topics and time-periods that I haven’t researched since I was an undergraduate. In most areas the pickings of new information, site and discoveries that I’ve missed in the intervening decade have been (surprisingly) slender, but as I riffled through journal papers on the look-out for the latest research into the palaeolithic I was blown away by developments in this field.
My spidery black-ink notes from an introductory lecture back in 2002 record the first hominin occupation in the British Isles at c.500,000 years ago. It was believed by some that prior to this date, the landmass at the NW of Europe that was to become the British Isles was too challenging a climate for the hominin species only recently (evolutionarily speaking) departed from tropical Africa. But clearly not by Chris Stringer and collaborators, who instigated a 5-year £1m Leverhulme research project to uncover the truth about the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB 1).
As part of this work, excavation at Pakefield, Sussex pushed back the boundary for homin activity by 200,000 years to 700,000ypb through an assemblage of flint tools (illustrated). Neat.
(Image: Harry Taylor/Natural History Museum)
But that isn’t the end of the story following hot on the heels of the success of AHOB 1, (which gave the academic community no less than 120 papers of new information about the palaeolithic) came the imaginatively named AHOB 2 and 3 and even older evidence from Happisburgh site 3, dated to somewhere around 800,000ybp. People have walked my green and pleasant land for the best part of a million years, although admittedly for a lot of that time it was more a tundra-covered / ice-cold / birch-forested land. As regards this, we now also have a much better understanding of the environment and climate that these people were inhabiting thanks to the AHOB project.
“So what?” I hear you cry. Well for me this project illustrates the value long-term, well designed, interdisciplinary research projects can bring to a field. Far from being the cultural and intellectual desert of the quaternary period, this project has demonstrated that the British Isles, despite their location, climate and the impact of subsequent geological and glacial processes reshaping the land and seas, are central to our understanding of the 98% of human history that we know so little of. The past is indeed a foreign country but one to which my homeland clearly holds a smart array of information about, and a smart array of people to uncover it.