Phil Harding

An Early Mesolithic Seasonal Hunting Site in the Kennet Valley, Southern England

A small-scale excavation, undertaken in advance of building works at Faraday Road, Newbury, Berkshire, encountered an apparently intact Early Mesolithic layer containing abundant worked flint directly associated with animal bones. The site lay on the floodplain of the River Kennet in an area already well-known for Mesolithic remains and certainly represents an extension of the site found at nearby Greenham Dairy Farm in 1963. The flint assemblage was dominated by obliquely-blunted microlithic forms accompanied by a restricted range of other items. The animal bones were, unusually, dominated by wild pig with clear evidence of both primary butchery and food waste. Spatial analysis of the bone and flint assemblages indicated discrete activity areas, possibly associated with hearths. Both pollen and molluscan data were recovered which, together with the results of soil micromorphological examination, confirmed an Early Holocene date for the formation of the Mesolithic layer. Radiocarbon dates place the site in the late 10th–early 9th millennium BP. The paper re-examines the nature of known Early Mesolithic activity in this part of the Kennet valley, with particular reference to the specific environmental conditions that seem to have prevailed. It is concluded that the Faraday Road site represents one part of a continuum of Early Mesolithic occupation that stretches along a considerable length of the floodplain, with each focus of activity witnessing repeated, but intermittent, occupation spanning a period of more than a millennium.

Recent investigations of Pleistocene sediments near Maidenhead, Berkshire, and their archaeological content

Recent archaeological and geological assessment of Thames terrace deposits to the north of Maidenhead has been undertaken. The principal site investigated was at Furze Piatt, incorporating the important Palaeolithic localities of Cannoncourt Farm Pit and Coopers Pit. The deposits form part of the Lynch Hill Terrace, although later sediments occur in addition to gravels deposited by the Thames. These later sediments comprise a predominantly fine-grained colluvial deposit (‘brickearth’) which is locally overlain by a tributary gravel. A temperate climate soil has been recognised in the ‘brickearth’ beneath this later gravel. Palaeolithic artefacts of predominantly Acheulian type occur within the Lynch Hill Gravel. Later artefacts, of probable Neolithic age, have been recovered from the ‘brickearth’.

A new Later Upper Palaeolithic open-air site with articulated horse bone in the Colne Valley, Berkshire

The end of the last Ice Age in Britain (c. 11500 BP) created major disruption to the biosphere. Open habitats were succeeded by more wooded landscapes, and changes occurred to the fauna following the abrupt disappearance of typical glacial herd species, such as reindeer and horse (Conneller & Higham 2015). Understanding the impact of these changes on humans and how quickly they were able to adapt may soon become clearer, due to recent discoveries in the Colne Valley on the western edge of Greater London, north of the River Thames. An exceptionally well-preserved open-air site was discovered in 2014 as part of a wider project of archaeological investigation and excavation carried out by Wessex Archaeology (2015), on behalf of CEMEX UK. The site, at Kingsmead Quarry in Horton, is unusual because it has good organic preservation and, in addition to worked flint artefacts, it has yielded groups of articulated horse bone. The extreme rarity of such sites of this period in Britain makes this discovery especially significant and re-emphasises the potential importance of the Colne Valley (Lacaille 1963; Lewis 2011; Morgi et al. 2011).