Pitfalls in Prehistory

Abstract

I have been repeatedly asked to record a few of the more picturesque pitfalls or potential pitfalls I have encountered in my fieldwork. In attempting to do so, I have selected examples which, although they deal with entirely recent events, reflect the kind of thing that has undoubtedly gone on in one form or another from time immemorial. Where they have no direct bearing on prehistory, they have a bearing on the general background of all archaeological fieldwork. Their picturesqueness neither hides, nor does it dull, the lessons they contain; rather the opposite, for the warnings within them need to be taken into account by all who work in the field. In some, the value is psychological as much as archaeological. There is little in prehistory that provides a greater problem than that which the Abbe Breuil calls a ‘travelling piece’—that is a piece collected on one site and deliberately transported to another. We have repeatedly found that men who lived on or near the bank of a river during the Later Stone Age gathered material for their tools in the river-bed where, as likely as not, the stones they collected were derived from an implement-bearing deposit of the Middle or even the Earlier Stone Age. In this way, Stone Age man could, and indeed often did, transport a millennia- or million-year-old artifact up from one geological horizon to another often very appreciably higher and therefore later. I have frequently found Old Palaeolithic bifaced tools, such as hand-axes, used as cores or fabricators on Upper Palaeolithic ‘living floors’; and I have traced the ‘floor’ of the handaxes to a deep-buried aggradation in the vicinity.