Arguments over the Ice Age

Abstract

The acceptance of human antiquity in the mid-nineteenth century fed a desire to know more about the age of these chipped stone tools from the drift. In 1863, Canon William Greenwell (1820–1918), the antiquary, archaeologist, and collector from Durham, declared: ‘The great question which has yet to be settled is this—at what period was the drift in which the flints are found deposited? And side by side with this was another important query—down to what time did these now extinct animals occupy any part of our continent?’ This chapter seeks to untangle the web of time that was spun around the stone implements of Britain over the last four decades of the nineteenth century. Greenwell’s great question was a popular one, and ‘what period’ was often answered by connecting the implementiferous drifts to the Glacial epoch. The mid-glacial submergence, entertained by geologists like Ramsay and Phillips, provided a convenient division between pre-glacial and post-glacial times. On each side of this great division, detailed patterns were being drawn in stratigraphy and bones. As decisions were made about the pre-glacial or post-glacial date of sediments from river drifts and caves, rich in tools and bones, the glacial chronology was, meanwhile, being revised and subdivided too. During the latter decades of the nineteenth century there was great activity and little agreement about the order of events in these distant times. Researchers immersed in different material, gathered from different geographical areas, and asking different questions would not find it easy—or even desirable—to mesh their findings into a single coherent sequence. Attempts to date the stone tools of Britain entered a contentious arena. The chronological indicators scrutinised by these researchers—river drifts, glacial drifts, and bones—offered few clear answers to Greenwell’s question. The sands, gravels, clays, and brickearths of Quaternary times were so scattered, patchy, and variable that even Prestwich found it diffcult to understand their sequence.