More information : Flint industry on Hengistbury Head, found 1914. The finds are in Red House Museum, Christchurch. (1)
"The Druitt Collection contains examples of an important Upper Palaeolithic blade with tanged flakes and burins from Hengistbury Head. Prof. J. Grahame Clark states that the flints closely resemble industries from Bromme and Lyngby in Denmark, where they date from the end of the Glacial and the very beginning of the Post-Glacial period." (2)
The best examples of these flints are with Prof Clark, at
Cambridge. Dateable to early Me or even earlier. The finds were made during the ploughing of a part of Hengistbury Head. Sited to SZ 17829052 from entries in Druitt's Diary. (3)
The area is now heather covered; no surface finds were made. (4)
A series of soundings were dug in 1957, in the unploughed area of the S of where Druitt made his finds. In one was found a concentration of flints (SZ 17809042 on plan). Of 2,263 flints found, 251 (11%) were tools - whole and broken; 81.3% were unused, and 7.7% waste products. Most were found at a depth of 1-2ft. The tools comprised burins, micro-burins, scrapers, cores, blades, etc., an assemblage with affinities to those from the great complex of Upper Palaeolithic open sites in NW Europe. (5)
Near the 1957 excavations, a concentration of 1,747 flints (95 implements including backed blades, scrapers and burins)
were found in 1968, along with faint traces of `stoke-holes' (?Stake-holes) in a `1.5m. ovoid alignment', near the surface and probably later than the flints. (6)
The site of the 1957 excavations is clearly visible as an area
of disturbed ground at SU 17909047, and the 1968 excavations are visible on the cliff edge at SU 17839041. (7)
Excavations, systematic collections and chance finds over a
number of years have located Palaeolithic and Mesolithic
industries, mainly in the vicinity of Warren Hill. Over 10,000 Mesolithic flints and 4,000 Palaeolithic flints have now been recovered. (8)
Analysis to finds and present location of material (9,10).
Many Palaeolithic surface finds have been recovered from the upper areas of the headland including a collection by Druitt, now housed in the Red House Museum, Christchurch. Excavations during the 1950s by Mace (5) and Calkin (11) located the site. Mace's excavations found the site to be undisturbed, containing concentrations of Upper Palaeolithic finds, confirming for the first time, the existance of a major open-air site of this period and type in Britain. Part of the site was re-excavated by Campbell in 1968 (9). He claimed to have discovered two discrete occupation levels, one Mesolithic the other Upper Palaeolithic. This was subsequently proved to be ill-founded, but for a time the site was regarded as one of the few instances where Mesolithic and Palaeolithic were found in a secure stratigraphical relationship one above the other.
Excavations in 1981-4 took place within the Eastern Depression, and found, contrary to claims by Campbell, that the site consisted of one homogeneous assemblage. Thermoluminescence dating of burnt artefacts resulted in six determinations with an average age of 12500 +/- 1150 years BC (OXTL 707a)
The assemblage is composed mainly of flint artefacts, some sandstone blocks and red ochre fragments. One flint core has an engraving on its cortex. A total of 649 retouched tools including 147 end scrapers, 66 burins and 324 backed blades and bladelets. The flint is non-local, imported to the site from c.12km away. Refitting has shown that the nodules were bought in whole, not preformed elsewhere.
A spatial separation of activities is represented by tool activity around the remains of a hearth, and a peripheral zone where the primary production of tool blanks occurred.
The site appears to have been used as a residential hunting location, situated within a well-sheltered dry stream valley. Based on Continental parallels the site is fairly typical of the larger hunter-gatherer aggregation sites, occupied seasonally during the autumn and spring migrations of animals such as horse and reindeer. (12) |