SAMUEL HAZZLEDINE WARREN. F.G.S. 145
His best known discovery was the Clacton spear—the oldest known
wooden artifact in the world—which he found in 1911 in the Elephas
antiquus Bed at Clacton-on-Sea in association with an industry of flint
flakes and chopper-cores which he was the first to recognise as represent-
ing a distinct palaeolithic tradition, partly contemporary with the
Acheulian. He proposed the name Clactonian in an address to the
South-Eastern Union of Scientific Societies in 1926, and this term was
subsequently adopted by Professor l'Abbe Breuil.
Largely as a result of spending a week or two each year tirelessly
combing the foreshore exposures, Warren built up an enormous collec-
tion of artifacts and fossil material (seeds, molluscan shells and mam-
malian remains) from the Pleistocene deposits at Clacton and Jaywick
Sands (Lion Point), which he recognised as filling a former channel of
the Thames. (A selection of this material has been on exhibition since
1950 in the Central Hall of the Natural History Museum.) After the
second world war, having recovered from an operation for cataract,
Warren got into touch with Dr. H. Godwin, F.R.S., of the Botany
School in Cambridge, and gained his collaboration in applying new
techniques to the study of the Clacton deposits. Warren superintended
boring operations on the front at Clacton, which provided material for
systematic pollen analysis of the various layers. As a result of this
research, evidence was obtained which made it possible to date the
Clacton channel deposits as of Second Interglacial age. While this
research was in progress, Warren re-investigated the Clactonian flint
industry and published a new interpretation, bringing it into line with
the flake and pebble-tool industries which represent the basic Palaeo-
lithic traditions of Africa and Asia.
The Late Pleistocene "Arctic Beds', rich in plant and mammalian
remains, which form part of the Upper Flood Plain Terrace at Ponders
End and elsewhere in the Lea Valley, were discovered by Warren in
1910. This resulted in a series of important papers by him in the
Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. His fine collections from
these beds, which included seeds and mosses, molluscan shells and
insect remains, as well as remains of mammoth and other mammalia,
are a tribute to his skill as a collector. He gained the co-operation of a
number of specialists in describing this remarkable material. After the
second war, he discovered a further series of deposits, including peats.
exposed by gravel diggings at Nazeing near Broxbourne, which provided
a link between Late Glacial and early Post-glacial times. Pollen-analysis
was applied to these layers, which were the subject of a long paper by
Warren in collaboration with Godwin and others in the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society, 1952. Already between the two wars,
Warren had discovered an important Mesolithic "floor" below the
Boreal peat at Broxbourne.
For over half a century he carried out innumerable investigations in
Essex, where he had come to live in 1903. In addition to his outstanding
discoveries there, he made valuable records of temporary sections in
Pleistocene and Holocene deposits, and on the archaeological side of
his work covered all periods from Palaeolithic to Roman and even later.