Swanscombe Palaeolithic site
geological site and nature reserve in Kent, England
The Swanscombe Skull Site is a 3.9-hectare (9.6-acre) geological Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and National Nature Reserve in Swanscombe, Kent, England, now forming part of the broader Swanscombe Heritage Park. The site lies within Barnfield Pit, the most significant of several former gravel quarries that once supplied raw materials to the nearby Swanscombe Cement Works, and contains two Geological Conservation Review sites. It dates to the Hoxnian interglacial (Marine Isotope Stage 11), around 425-375,000 years ago. It is best known for the fragmentary remains of the skull of an archaic human dubbed "Swanscombe Man", likely an early Neanderthal or Homo heidelbergensis.. Numerous stone artifacts, including handaxes, have also been recovered from the quarry
History of research
The earliest archaeological remains were uncovered in Barnfield pit in the late 1880s, and the site has been subject to scientific research since then. Many of the artifacts from the site have been collected by workmen from Barnfield without clear stratigraphic context, though the site has been subject to several formal scientific investigations, including by Reginald Smith and Henry Dewey in the 1910s, R.H. Chandler in the 1920s, Alvin T. Marston in the 1930s and John Wymer in the 1950s and early 1960s. The excavations led by John d'Arcy Waechter in 1968-72 of Barnfield pit led to the adoption of a stratigraphic scheme for the sediments of the quarry that has been widely adopted by later authors.
Geology
The Pleistocene sediments of the quarry overlie much older Paleocene aged rocks of the Thanet Formation. The earliest Pleistocene unit within the sequence, the "basal gravel" (Unit Ia), consists of gravel deposits dating to the Anglian glaciation (MIS 12 ~478-424,000 years ago). This is followed by sediments deposited by the nearby River Thames, forming part of a river terrace, dating to the Hoxnian interglacial (globally known as Marine Isotope Stage 11~425-375,000 years ago), the first of these units is the "Lower Gravel" (Ib), containing high energy fluvial sediments in some areas with "midden" (Ic) sediments containing archaeological artifacts and animal bones.
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This entry incorporates text from “Swanscombe Palaeolithic site” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.