Swanscombe: A Standard Stone-Age Sequence for Britain?

In the early twentieth century, Palaeolithic research seemed to be flourishing on the Continent. Commont was carrying out groundbreaking work in the Somme, and rich hauls were being recovered from the reindeer-caves of France and Spain. France could also boast a research centre: the Institute of Human Palaeontology, where Boule, Breuil, and Obermaier held posts. Britain, though, was weighed down by nostalgia: unfavourable contrasts were being drawn between current research and the glorious decades of the past when Evans and Prestwich had brought such renown to British investigations. This apparent loss of impetus was noted abroad. Boule considered the British to have sunk into insularity after 1875, never to regain their early brilliance; in 1912, Breuil remarked at a luncheon party in Cambridge that no one in England knew anything about prehistory. The British Museum’s Guide to the Antiquities of the Stone Age, published in 1911 at the height of Commont’s work, declared: ‘the French system has now been revised in the light of recent discoveries, and is the basis of all Continental classifications’. It was regretted that the English river drifts had still not received any systematic excavations, and that the implements in these sediments still lay in confusion. This Guide was produced by Reginald Smith of the British Museum under the direction of Charles Hercules Read (1857–1929). In 1912, the same year that Breuil made his disparaging comment, Read arranged for Smith to excavate in one of the most productive Palaeolithic localities of the Thames Valley: Swanscombe village. Smith was assisted by Henry Dewey (1876–1965) of the Geological Survey, but the negotiations that gained Dewey’s help would also reveal differences of opinion between their two respective institutions about the value of Palaeolithic research. The connections drawn by Smith to the Continental sequence after working at Swanscombe would lift the gloom about British backwardness. These connections would also help draw the Palaeolithic and geological sequences closer together.

The Pre-Palaeolithic of East Anglia

The attacks of Warren and Haward had dominated the realms of flint-fracture research, and the defensive forays of Moir and Lankester had not strengthened the cause of the pre-palaeoliths as much as they might have hoped. But Lankester was grooming Moir in another approach: how to promote the pre-palaeoliths as respectable archaeological specimens. He advised, ‘You can always state what are the accepted views & pros & cons put forward by geologists as to relative ages of deposits. But you yourself are & must be more & more, an expert & critic of the worked flints themselves.’ Moir and Lankester would identify distinct groups and types in their motley assortment of pre-palaeoliths. They would reconstruct lengthy industrial sequences, degenerating back to the Kent eoliths on the one hand and progressing to the river-drift palaeoliths on the other. Similar approaches had characterized earlier attempts to order the tools of the river drifts and caves (see Chapters 3 and 4), but Moir and Lankester were not simply aiming to understand how their industry fitted into a broader Stone-Age sequence. The existence of diVerent tool types and evolutionary stages within the Pre- Palaeolithic provided them with another opportunity to convince their critics that these flints were as reputable as any of their Palaeolithic descendants, and could be classified according to similar principles. This chapter addresses these archaeological reconstructions and then turns to the style and tone of this work. Presentation could merit as much attention as content; but though Lankester took care to select arenas that would enhance the respectability of his stones, he was often irritated by the reaction of the audience, and Moir could become enraged. For these two believers in the pre-palaeoliths, the scientific ideals of disinterested objectivity sat uneasily alongside the belligerent outbursts that punctuated their practice. For the historian, their unusual forthrightness offers a vivid glimpse of the social tactics behind Stone-Age research.

River-Drift Men and Cave Men

British researchers often compared their river-drift tools to French finds. The gravel pits of St Acheul, rich in hand-axes, were a popular choice. Another was the cave of Le Moustier, known for its scrapers. By the end of the nineteenth century, British tools might be called ‘Mousterian’, ‘Acheulian’, or ‘Chellean’. These labels are associated with the French prehistorian Gabriel de Mortillet, and it is often assumed that de Mortillet’s classification clarified a hazy image of the British Palaeolithic sequence. There are two problems with this assumption. First, the picture of river-drift tools gained from Chapter 3 suggests that British researchers cannot be compared to a sponge, waiting to soak up Continental classifications. They did use these French labels, but they did not necessarily adopt all de Mortillet’s beliefs as well. Second, researchers other than de Mortillet were building sequences on the Continent in the nineteenth century, and de Mortillet was aware of their research when he developed his Chellean, Acheulian, and Mousterian epochs. So were British researchers, but they were also encouraged by these Continental findings to make another, more fundamental, division of the British implements. One question that had puzzled British researchers was the connection between tools from their caves and those from their river-drifts; it was dificult to link the isolated pockets of cave sediments to the drifts lying in river valleys. Another question, closely related, concerned the term ‘Palaeolithic’: what tools and what time-period did it encompass? The geologists from Chapter 2 used their sequences of bones, river drifts, and glaciers to answer the first question; but answers to both were also found in the bones and tools of France and Belgium (Map 1 gives the location of the major sites mentioned in the text).

Ancient Dwellers of the Thames Valley

Stone-Age classifications of the nineteenth century are usually dismissed in a few sentences that refer briefly to Lubbock’s ‘Palaeolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’ divisions; the faunal chronology developed by the French palaeontologist, Édouard Lartet (1801–1871); and the famous industrial classification promoted by the French prehistorian, Gabriel de Mortillet. The reactions of other researchers to the stone tools of the British river drifts have been hidden under their shadow. But if the varied and detailed patterns that these researchers saw in the river-drift tools are painted back into the historical picture, a clearer perspective is gained of their response to Continental research and the reasoning behind more comprehensive classifications of the British Palaeolithic. Some of those who worked on the stone tools of Britain have already been introduced: Lubbock, Dawkins, Lyell, and James Geikie played geological roles in Chapter 2; Evans defended human antiquity in Chapter 1. All five published synthetic works on the British Palaeolithic. Lyell was one of the first to draw the new mass of information together in his book on the Antiquity of Man (1863), which sold well but did not impress all his peers. Lyell received several charges of plagiarism and Greenwell, the Durham archaeologist, confided to his friend: ‘We want Master Evans, a good book on the Antiquity of Man, there is quite sufficient matter now accumulated to admit of one. Lyell’s book is not satisfactory, there is too much of dubious evidence bought in, & with all humility I say, he is not master of the subject’. Other authors followed close on Lyell’s tail. In 1865, the first edition of Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times, an account of past and present savages, could be purchased for fifteen shillings. Evans produced Ancient Stone Implements in 1872, a cautious, catalogue-like description of stone tools, full of careful engravings and priced at twenty-eight shillings. Dawkins presented his ideas about the Stone Age alongside now-familiar palaeontological arguments in Cave Hunting (1874) and Early Man in Britain (1880). Geikie’s glacial chronology had a central place in Prehistoric Europe (1881), the book that widened his rift with Dawkins.

Arguments over the Ice Age

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.

The Advent of the Abbé Breuil

In 1930, Boswell made a compelling statement of his faith in the British Palaeolithic sequence as a reliable guide to geological time. The archaeologist Harold Peake (1867–1946), honorary curator of Newbury Museum whose interests ranged from earliest prehistory to the Bronze Age, had attended the same session at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was provoked by Boswell’s conviction to offer a cautious warning: As a geologist he [Boswell] is sceptical of the possibility of solving the problem [of placing the East Anglian glacial deposits in sequence] by geological means, and turns to archaeological evidence as supplying more reliable data for the purpose. As an archaeologist I have similar doubts as to the efficacy of my own subject, though I am inclined to believe that the possibilities of the geological approach have been underrated. I would submit that the true succession of types of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic phases, with which alone we are concerned, appears today to be by no means as certain as it did ten years ago. Broadly speaking we have evidence of successive stages of two industries, a core industry and a flake industry. Peake explained that some stages of the flake industry, which included ‘the types known as Levallois and LeMoustier and perhaps others’, seemed to have existed in Britain before the core industry went out of use. (‘Core’ industries were those like the Chellean and Acheulian: with hand-axes that were often made on nodules or ‘cores’ of flint.) This meant that ‘the simple succession, Early Chelles, Chelles, Evolved Chelles, St Acheul, and Le Moustier no longer holds good’. Early flake industries, like Warren’s Mesvinian from Clacton, had attracted more interest of late. By appearing alongside the hand-axe industries of the simple, standard sequence, they added greater variety to the character of stone tools that had existed at any one period of time, but they also reduced the chronological value of the old Palaeolithic sequence. Boswell, though he was absent from this meeting of 1930 (his paper had been read for him), learnt of Peake’s concern. He complained the following year: ‘If, as Mr. H. Peake has recently said, ‘‘. . . the simple succession Early Chelles, Chelles, Evolved Chelles, St Acheul, and Le Moustier no longer holds good,’’ I personally almost despair of a solution’.

Conclusion

Ideas about the British Palaeolithic and its connections to geological time changed enormously between the days of the early eighteenth century, when Bagford wondered whether the implement found by Conyers at Gray’s Inn Lane had been left by an Ancient Briton near the bones of a Roman elephant, and the century covered in this book. In the hundred years that followed the acceptance of human antiquity—between c.1860 and c.1960— similar tools were scrutinized by many other interested eyes; they were labelled and classified, and their age and meaning were vigorously debated. In the present study, I have provided a picture of changing ideas about British Palaeolithic tools and their place in geological time, and have also tried to recover the excitement of the arguments that swept through this century of geological research and its little-known relations with archaeology. Views of the past were not built up by dispassionate authorities, coolly observing the range of available and expanding data; the gaze of each individual was restricted by different questions and expectations that encouraged them to describe, interpret, and defend different patterns in the ancient stone tools of Britain. It is now time, before closing this chapter on the history of British Palaeolithic research, to stand back and take a broader look at some of the reasons for these differing beliefs and for their varying success. But first, a recapitulation is offered of the major developments. In this summary, presented below, the Gray’s Inn Lane implement is followed through time to highlight the changes in perception of the Palaeolithic. During the latter part of the tale, this pear-shaped ‘hand-axe’ found by Conyers is accompanied by the Clactonian industry, which has supplied a more familiar anchor point for the shifting interpretations described in previous chapters. Human antiquity was widely accepted in learned circles after they heard the famous papers of 1859. But it was a few years more before the hand-axe from Gray’s Inn Lane became described as the contemporary of many extinct prehistoric animals and assigned to post-submergence, post-glacial times. The work of geologists was central to the task of placing such implements more precisely in Britain’s distant past. Chapters 1 and 2 described how geologists had been attracted in increasing numbers to the once-unpopular drifts and the bones and tools that they preserved.

Geological Re-shuZing and the Growth of Suspicion

A song written for the last day of the 1973 conference on Quaternary geology held at Burg Wartenstein, Austria, offers an unintentionally accurate description of the atmosphere that surrounded British geological research in the 1930s. The words were intended to be sung to the tune of Clementine: . . . In a valley in die Alpen in neunteen-hundred neun Oh, there werkte Penck and Bruückner, carving up the Pleistoceun. They had Günzes, they had Würmses in the Stages on their list, But the biggest and the Grösstest—Interglacial Mindel–Riss CHORUS (repeat after each verse) Correlation, constipation. Oh, now what are we to do? All these bedses without dateses. Oh we’re really in the stew! . . . In the archives of British geologists who were working about four decades before this song was written, lie scraps of paper covered with scribbled suggestions about geological correlations. They testify to an intense interest in the connections between boulder clays, river terraces, and stone tools; and the great question of how they could all be correlated to the master-sequence of Alpine glaciations established by Penck and Brückner. This was a complicated problem. In 1930 Chandler, who had been examining the Clactonian industries at Swanscombe, confessed to Dixon of the Geological Survey: I once (before the War) was impertinent enough to try & apply Penck’s classification to Raised Beaches & Terraces inland but I read & read & took notes till I could not see the forest for trees & gave it up. Now, I don’t see why we should not work out our own glaciations without reference to what happened on the Continent. [...] Stratification is the key, I believe & palaeontology may be helpful or, it may be a bloody nuisance, as we have seen. E. Anglia is the place, but very difficult, & I confess I have never been able to read S.V. Wood & understand him. Chandler’s peers would return with vigour to the task of Alpine correlation as the 1930s drew on.

Chronologies of the Early Twentieth Century

Dr Allen Sturge spelled out some of the problems facing researchers who worked on the British Palaeolithic in his first Presidential Address to the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia. For the Drift period, the main task was ‘to ascertain the relative ages of the humanly-worked stones, and the number of the periods concerned’.1 In 1908, when Sturge made this suggestion, he was troubled by suspicions that the French divisions—Chellean, Acheulian, and Mousterian—were too broad to encompass the variety of British tools. He called on the younger school of geologists to help solve the dificulty. A few elderly Wgures, familiar from previous chapters, would accompany Sturge’s younger school of geologists as they worked on various sequences that could give a date to the stone tools of Britain. James Geikie published The Antiquity of Man in Europe in 1914, still defending his sequence of interglacials. 2 Harmer was inspired to take up the glacial researches of his old friend Wood as the twentieth century dawned. The refiection left by the Glacial epoch in East Anglia also led the young geologist Percy Boswell (1886–1960) to consider the connections between boulder clays and Palaeolithic industries. Dawkins continued to promote his classification of Quaternary mammals and to attack Geikie’s views, but two newcomers took a different approach to the palaeontological sequence. Martin A. C. Hinton and Alfred Santer Kennard used the bones of smaller mammals and the shells of molluscs to reconstruct the geological history of the Thames Valley. They maintained the traditional antagonism of palaeontologists towards the theories of glacial geologists by suggesting controversial links between the river drifts and the glacial sequence.3 Meanwhile, Warren, the eolith sceptic, developed his own opinions about the British Palaeolithic sequence and its place in geological time as he worked on Palaeolithic sites around Essex. Several different answers to Sturge’s question about the relative ages of stone tools would be extracted with the help of these sequences of glacial deposits, bones and shells, and river sediments.

Eoliths: An Earlier Phase of the Stone Age?

In 1912, Edwin Ray Lankester (1847–1929), a well-regarded zoologist, was introducing some interesting and ancient flints to the academic world at a Royal Society soirée when he spotted Dawkins in the room. The two men started to quarrel over the stones. Soon afterwards, Lankester described the incident to a friend, explaining ‘Dawkins was there and I made him go over them with me’. Dawkins, though now elderly, was still outspoken. He proceeded to attack Lankester’s view that the flints in question were very early tools, arguing that they had not been flaked by human hands. Lankester recalled that Dawkins had ‘idiotically said that such conchoidal fractures as they showcould be produced by pressure’ and had placed the burden of proof on Lankester’s shoulders: ‘Well, unless you can show that these flints could not possibly be produced by natural agencies, I shall refuse to attribute them to man.’ Lankester had responded that this was ‘a preposterous & unscientific attitude’ and further informed Dawkins: ‘neither I nor any one who had studied the subject, attached any importance to his opinion!’ The kind of stones displayed by Lankester in 1912 aroused enthusiasm and irritation in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were claimed as the artefacts of tool-makers who had lived before the Palaeolithic period, in Eolithic times (from the Greek eos: dawn and lithos: stone). Lankester’s flints, which came from East Anglia, belonged to the second major group of eoliths to be discovered in Britain; the first group had been reported from Kent in the 1880s and 1890s. His arguments with Dawkins in the rooms of the Royal Society encapsulate the character of the British eolith debates. Lankester was trying to describe what he thought was an important new Stone-Age industry and was irritated by the suggestion that he should prove they were not produced by natural agencies. Dawkins could see only natural chipping in these stones; neither was convinced by the case of the other and the discussion grew heated. Nowadays, both groups of eoliths are usually regarded as the natural products of geological forces; in these chapters, though, the eoliths will occasionally be described as artefacts to retain the atmosphere of the arguments.