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THE PALAEOLITHIC PERIOD IN THE
THAMES BASIN.
By J. P. JOHNSON.
THE earliest evidence of pre-historic man's presence in the
Thames Basin is afforded by an ancient deposit of gravel
which occurs in patches on the Chalk Plateau known as the
North Downs. The Plateau Gravel indeed is the oldest deposit
that has yielded relics of the primaeval savage. These consist of
pieces of flint, the edges of which in most cases have been
notched through use, though in many they have been chipped
into more or less regular curves suitable for scraping, which
is the commonest and no doubt one of the first uses to which a
piece of flint was put by primitive man. These rude implements
from the Plateau Gravel belong to the earliest, or Eolithic,
period of the Stone Age.
After the deposition of the Plateau Gravel a great interval of
time elapsed during which no fluviatile beds were laid down in
the area under consideration, so that when the next series of
deposits—the valley-drifts—began to be formed, man had reached
a much higher state of culture than that of the Eolithic period.
The valley drifts occur on the sides of the valleys where they
have been left by the rivers at former epochs in their excavating
career. They may be grouped into a high and low-level series,
and consist chiefly of gravel, though the latter contain thick
masses of brickearth or loam in places, especially in the main
valley below London. The implements found in these deposits
are termed Palaeolithic and differ very materially from those
from the Plateau Gravel; indeed they mark a complete revolution
in the art of making flint implements.
The scraping and allied tools, which still make up the bulk of
the implements, are now all fashioned out of artificially produced
flakes. Man had no longer any need to search for suitably
shaped splinters, as he had now learnt to make them for himself.
The method employed was to first obtain a flat surface by
breaking off the end of a nodule and then driving off slices at
right-angles to it by sharp blows with another stone. Some of
these flake tools can now be assigned to definite purposes but
the uses to which the majority were put are quite inexplicable.
Fig. 1 shows a scraper of average workmanship.
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