Implements from High-Level Gravel near Canterbury

Abstract

Though the terrace gravels and palaeoliths of north-west Kent are well-known, there is little published on the stratigraphy of implements elsewhere in the county, except the Sturry deposits, two miles north-east of Canterbury (Archaeologia, LXXIV, 117). The geological Drift map is old (the latest edition issued in 1875), and there is no memoir to elucidate any but the Dartford area; but in 1925 the geology of the Canterbury district was described by Messrs. Dewey, Wooldridge, Cornes and Brown in the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, vol. XXXVI, pp. 257–290, and Messrs. Wooldridge & Kirkaldy read a paper to that Association this April on the physiographic evolution of north-east Kent, which throws much light on the problem presented by the Fordwich flints.Formerly the port of Canterbury, Fordwich lies on the right or southern bank of the Great Stour opposite Sturry, and at the foot of a steep hill, which rises to 150 ft. and leads to an elevated plain between the valleys of the Great and Little Stour. In the angle between the road leading due southfrom Fordwich and that from Stodmarsh to Canterbury, west of Moat Cottages (6 in. O.S. map, Kent, XLVI, N.E.), gravel has been worked over a considerable area, the depth being about 7 feet on the east and over 20 feet at the west end. The nearest bench-mark is 151·4 feet and the base of the gravel on the west is therefore about 130 feet O.D., rising to the east. The tongue of high ground between the rivers is covered in patches with gravel and brick-earth resting on Thanet Sand, and forms a plateau about 5 miles long at about the 100 ft. level.

On the earliest Acheulean in Britain: first dates and in-situ artefacts from the MIS 15 site of Fordwich (Kent, UK)

“…Immediately above the excavated gravel mass was a small collection of Neolithic artefacts, supporting our assertion that the intermediate sand layer and upper gravels found elsewhere at Fordwich (and described by Smith [2]) have not been removed through industrial quarrying processes. These finds are not the focus of the present article and will be described in future work, but include ceramics, flint blades, debitage and a hammerstone.…”

“…[7] upper gravels and loam are only present in part of the western edge of the quarry (figure 3), while the lower main gravel stretches across the western edge of the Fordwich Pit between the 1998 and 2020 locations (figure 3). This covers the western edge of the pit near the brow of the hill, where most of the handaxes were recovered [2,4]. Our excavations reveal this sediment to contain artefacts dating to the early Acheulean period in Europe.…”

“…A large number of flake artefacts were discovered during the original quarrying work at Fordwich Pit [2], although little is known about their technological characterization. Our excavations discovered 238 flakes and flake fragments.…”

“…Confirming the MIS 15 age of the previously discovered handaxes is a little more complicated. Smith [2] notes the handaxes to have been recovered from ‘near the brow of the hill’, which would put them closer to our new MIS 14 excavations than the Bridgland et al . [7] exposures.…”

“…Due to the fluvial deposition of the sediment [2,20] we anticipated there to be occasional challenges when identifying artefacts. Thus, a highly conservative approach to artefact identification was followed.…”