The Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Industries of the English East Midlands

Abstract

The first palaeoliths to be described from this country were found in the south of England, particularly from the Thames Valley and East Anglia. In 1880 Boyd Dawkins wrote that tools of Drift Man were ‘conspicuous by their absence from the gravels north-west of a line passing through the Midland counties from Bristol to the Wash’. In 1897 John Evans (Evans 1897, 580), in the light of the Saltley find from the Birmingham district, questioned the view then current that their absence was due to glacial conditions prevailing north of the Severn—Wash ‘imaginary’ line, and held out hope for future finds in that northern area.Though hand axes had earlier been described from Chester (Stone 1908, 25) and Bridlington (Evans 1897, 572) it was not until the 1920's that Sir John Evans's hopes began to be realized. Randall Davies brought attention to a hand axe found in railway ballast gravel from Skellingthorpe in Lincolnshire in 1920.In the West Midlands numerous isolated finds were described from 1920 onwards by Burkitt (1920), Jack, Smith, Shotton and Clifford, the last two authors having in recent years (Shotton 1934 and 1953, Clifford 1954) provided a fairly comprehensive account and bibliography of the Lower and Middle palaeolithic finds from the West Midlands. In the East Midlands the story of discovery has been slower and very little of the material found has been published. In 1922 R. A. Smith published two flake implements from Leicestershire, though these cannot now be accepted (Posnansky 1955, 31).