The discovery which is the subject of these notes was unfortunately rendered incomplete by the fact that the initial exhumation of the bones was not witnessed by me, as I came on the scene after the greater part of the skeleton had been shovelled away by those ignorant of its scientific value.

The gravel-pit in which I found the remains appears to be cut into a Plateau gravel, probably of an age corresponding to the break-up of one of the great glaciations. It is situated near, but not on, the summit of an eminence called Kedington Hill, about 2 miles South-by-East of Sudbury Station. The site was once included under the name of Kedington Common, and is on the North side of the road called Kedington Lane.

During the past few years discoveries of flaked flints of various kinds have been made in certain pre-river-valley deposits in Suffolk and Norfolk, and the discoverers of these specimens have had to meet, from some quarters, a very determined opposition to the view that these stones have been fashioned by man at periods long anterior to those in which the earliest Palæolithic implements were made. The details of the discovery of these flaked flints have already been made public in various scientific publications, and papers have been published giving the discoverers' reasons for believing them to be of human manufacture, and their opponents' reasons for looking upon them as purely natural productions.

In the last part of our Proceedings I gave an account of the series of experiments I had carried through with flints subjected to natural pressure and percussion, and endeavoured to show how the flaking produced by these experiments differed from that seen upon undoubted examples of human handiwork. The chief objection brought against my conclusions was that it is impossible to imitate the forces of Nature which act upon flints by shaking stones in a sack and fracturing them by pressure in a screw-press, and I confess that at first sight this appears to be a very weighty argument and one difficult to refute. But a close and searching examination of these “mighty forces of Nature,” a phrase often used with marked effect upon an uncritical audience, will, I think, show that they are largely inoperative upon flints, and that if they are too “mighty” the flint succumbs and is shattered to fragments.

On the 3rd of October, 1909, I found on a stone heap in Messrs. Bolton and Laughlin's brickfield near Ipswich a large flint implement fashioned from a cylindrical nodule and flaked to a cutting edge at one end. This implement, which is obviously very massive, weight 8¾lbs., is deeply patinated on its worked surfaces a yellowish-brown colour, and has a very hard ferruginous deposit attached to portions of its crust.

Following on this discovery I commenced, searching for others, and eventually found them lying on the London Clay under a seam of decalcified crag, and associated with many bones and phosphatic nodules such as are met with at other ordinary bases of the Red Crag. This decalcified crag occurs in two basin-shaped hollows, one 56 yards wide and the other 45 yards, in the London Clay. The general arrangement of the beds (Plate I.) in the hollows is as follows:—

1. Top sand and gravel, in places up to 9 feet in thickness.

2. Middle Glacial Sands, with sarsen stones, maximum thickness 12 feet to 15 feet.

3. Decalcified crag, with casts of shells up to 3 feet. This is very hard in the eastern hollow, and rests upon an uneven floor of London Clay, containing pockets filled with pebbles, and boulders of flint and micaceous sandstone.

In approaching the subject of the patination of flint implements, I am profoundly impressed with the very great difficulties of the subject; so much so indeed that I feel that some initial apology is called for. It requires some courage, nay, one may say temerity, to attack a series of problems that bristle with difficulties of a most formidable kind, about which nothing is known; and for a solution of which chemical and physical knowledge of a very high order, backed up by the aid of full laboratory equipment, is required. All this is wanting in my own case; but on the other hand I have a large first-hand acquaintance with the flints in question; for many years I have devoted much attention to the conditions in which patination is found, jand to its manifold varieties—it has been my constant endeavour to co-ordinate given patinations with other factors more or less ascertainable in connection with the flints. In this way I think I have arrived at conclusions which, though by ao means complete in themselves, may at any rate serve as points of departure or of support in the further investigations which are urgently required. I propose to divide my paper into three sections—(1) General considerations bearing on the study of patina, (2) The conditions under which patina is produced, (3) The changes in flint associated with the production of patina.

The parish of Barnham, in North-West Suffolk, a little over two miles from Thetford, has never been noted for its flint implements, and the few found there have for the most part gone unrecorded. The finding of some implements there in the early part of 1912 induced me to trace as many previous specimens as I could, and by the kindness of Mr. H. Muller (Eltham), Mr. G. J. Buscall Fox (Upper Tooting), Mr. C. F. Newton (Saham Toney), and Mr. H. Dixon Hewitt (Thetford), I have examined a series of implements of more than usual interest on account of the succession of periods which they represent.

Chellean.—In 1882, Mr. A. G. Wright obtained “two flint implements from the gravel near Barnham” (Geological Memoir of Ely, Mildenhall, Thetford,” p. 80). These are now in the possession of Mr. G. J. Buscall Fox. One is the broad end of an ochreous pear-shaped implement (2¾ in. by 2 in.)—apparently Chellean—and probably found in the gravel-pit east of the village.

Since reading a paper before the Archæological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in February, 1913, on the two factory sites at Peppard, Oxon, we have carried out further excavations, and I propose to give a brief account of the new implements found there, and to discuss the evidence as to the date arrived at as a result of the whole work. Sections of the sites and a map showing their position were given in that paper, and 28 of the implements illustrated.

The deeper site (Site 1) was re-opened by Mr. Reginald Smith, F.S.A., of the British Museum, in October, 1913, and some of the problems connected with it cleared up. This site was then found to be an open pit, similar to a modern chalk pit, with a pathway leading into it from the lowest level, 8 ft. across and 7½ ft. long. The floor of this adit formed a gently inclined plane to the bottom of the pit, being covered at the entrance with 2½ ft. of rainwash. This method of approach to the mine is what one would expect from its situation on the slope of a hill. It differs thus from the mines at Cissbury and Grime's Graves, where the circular cups were much deeper (40 ft.) and must have been entered by some form of ladder, such as a tree trunk with the branches cut short to form steps or a rope made of hide.

The estuarine peaty shale still to be seen in the cliff section below the Martello tower at Clacton has a thickness of 10 or 12 feet, and seems to pass gradually into a dark clay which we find as the top layer of the shore deposit. On the shore below the Martello, and east of the stone groyne, the following layers were observed:—

1. Dark, stiff clay, without shells. To be seen only on the upper part of the shore, near the sea-wall. Further down, it. has been denuded. Thickness, c. 9 in. from shore sand.

2. A shelly layer, containing much Unıo littoralis: more sandy than the last. c. 3 in.

3. A dark layer with occasional shells. Lower limit variable. c. 4 in.

4. Blue loam: one of the most characteristic features of the deposit. Shells of Unio occur. Helix was also found. There is also in some parts much wood. Partly embedded in this layer most of the bones are found on the shore surface. Eastwards the layer grows less homogeneous and comes to rest directly on the London Clay. I am not sure what is the full thickness of this layer, but, where it is covered by others, I have dug 18 in. into it without reaching anything else. Accumulation of water and return of the tide prevented deeper trenching, but I think if we gave 2 feet as the total thickness we should not be far wrong.

5. A very thin layer, made up almost wholly of fragments of Unio.

6. Sand, shells, and broken flints. Thickness varies; 3 in. and 5 in. were measured in two trenches.

7. Stony layer. Flint pebbles, broken flints, some sand, some shells. Astragalus of deer, horn core (probably of deer), tibia of deer were found in trenching this layer.

Few English deposits have aroused more disputation among geologists than the Crag beds of Norfolk and Suffolk, and on many of the points raised there is as yet no general agreement. This more particularly applies to the sands, gravels, and clays associated with the Norwich Crag, one school considering them part of the Crag formation and therefore Pliocene, and another believing them to be glacial and Pleistocene. Doubt on this matter has had an important bearing on the discovery of Sub-Crag implements in Norfolk, though I believe that the evidence is now incontrovertible. With regard to the basement-bed of the Crag, whether of the Coralline, Red, or Norwich Crag, which appear to have been successive deposits in the order given, the geological evidence as to position and antiquity—though not as to the conditions under which it was deposited—is not disputed. Mr. F. W. Harmer, F.G.S., says:—“In consequence of a combined movement of elevation iu the southern part of this region, and of subsidence towards the north, the whole Crag basin moving as on a pivot, its southern margin was gradually shifted, the sea retiring towards the north.

Grimes' Graves and the peculiar type of implements associated with them being very much discussed at the present time, our Hon. Sec. has invited me, as the finder of a good many of these implements, to give a short paper describing them and some details of the localities.

My first two visits to the “Graves” were practically fruitless as far as implements were concerned. However, I stumbled across the pit excavated by Canon Greenwell and brought back a large bone from the debris surrounding it. Subsequent visits showed the best place to search was on the arable land. Every year since then, by the kindness of the agent for the Weeting Estate, I have been enabled to spend several days searching, and have brought away some heavy loads of spoil.

The Blacks nowadays are tame, but when Fortescue came up in about 1856 exploring, he had considerable bother with them, and even now in the Kimberley district, some 500 miles away, they are still in the Stone Age, and cannot be trusted. To-day at Millstream, stone implements are only used for circumcision and cutting out spears. The spears are made of hard wood and barbed both ways so that it is impossible to pull or push them out, and the blacks cut them out with a hot flake. The fire in which the flake is heated must not be lighted with a match but with a fire stick. By using a stone and not a knife they maintain that they do not get blood poisoning, and that the wound heals sooner. I showed one of my large black flakes to a native woman, and she said, “He good fella stone, he cut'em out spear, he borrow Ian.” Whether she meant a flake was called “borrow Ian,” or the kind of stone upon which the flake was made was “borrow Ian” I could not make out, but on showing her another, a yellow coloured scraper, she said, “He bad fella, he poison.”

The object of this paper is to call attention to certain facts in connection with flint implements, both Palæolithic and Neolithic, which have been hitherto overlooked, and to attempt to find an explanation for them. This explanation must inevitably run counter to the generally received opinions of geologists as to the sequence of events in the Pleistocene period, and also to a large extent to the views hitherto held by prehistoric archælogists regarding the Neolithic, and in a less degree the Palæolithic ages of man. I therefore approach the task, not indeed with misgiving, but with a deep sense of the gravity of the issues involved, and I would ask both geologists and prehistoric archæologists to do me the honour of giving their very careful attention to the matters I am bringing forward; to put for the moment on one side any preconceived views on the subject, and to suspend judgment until they have had the opportunity of examining for themselves the data upon which my conclusions are founded. These conclusions are the result of many years of work and observation. Starting from the orthodox standpoint and without any bias whatever against the generally received opinions as to the ice age of the Northern hemisphere, I have been, drawn on wholly by the observation of facts to my present position.

It is difficult to prove that a road is prehistoric—in many cases more difficult to prove that it is not—but the fourteen miles of the Norfolk “Drove,” “Droveway,” or “Harling Drove,” which connects the fenland at Blackdike, Hockwold, with Peddar's Way on Roudham Heath, have certain claims to: that distinction. Though not so well known as the Northumberland “Drove Way” or the Surrey “Drove. Road,” and probably a favourite route in mediæval times for flocks and herds to and from the fens, its origin must be sought in a much more remote period, and as for the greater part of its course its primitive condition is still retained, it is easy—possibly with the mental elimination of all trees from the landscape—to picture it as it was in its early days.

On Thursday, June 15th, 1911, accompanied by Mr. H. H. Halls, I went to Lyng to look over the Manor Farm for Neolithic implements, or other traces of prehistoric man. During the day, while looking round a pit, I noticed a number of flint flakes projecting from one side. I collected a few of these, and, upon examination, noticed they were different from anything I had seen on the surface. The following day I shewed these specimens to Mr. W. G. Clarke, explaining to him the position in which I had found them, and he suggested they might probably come from the remains of a floor, either Neolithic or Palæolithic. I visited the pit several times after this, each time getting further specimens. Quite recently Mr. Clarke, Mr. Halls, and myself, visited the pit, when, after careful examination, Mr. Clarke had no hesitation in stating that in his opinion the site was the remains of a floor, but whether Neolithic or Late Palffiolithic it is difficult to determine, the number of finished implements being so small, though the geological evidence would favour the latter view.

In the summer of 1904 I received some letters from the late Mr. Auberon Herbert, together with some small neolithic worked flints from Egypt and other places, which he considered to represent human faces and certain animals. There was no doubt that in some of these, even without a stretch of the imagination, likenesses could be traced to specified living forms, but owing to the peculiar shapes into which the sharp edge of a flint flake will get naturally broken, I wrote to Mr. Herbert that I was not convinced that these specimens were prehistoric Cameos as he maintained they were. During the same summer I came across a mass of Thames ballast which had been brought by lighters from near Gravesend and deposited at Southend to construct an Esplanade. On searching these I found, besides a very fine scraper and many flakes, a specimen which struck me as being so animistic in form that, though purely a natural object (as I then thought it was) I took it home, with the idea of sending it to the remarkable collection of flint nodules and ventriculites (without human work) which Mr. McKenny Hughes shows at the Geological Museum at Cambridge.

Though Sir John Evans described a series of flint implements as “single-barbed arrowheads,” the shape of the majority precluded any such explanation of their use, and it was not until Dr. A. E. Relph put forward the suggestion in “The Antiquary” for September, 1907, that these implements were in reality harpoon-barbs, that students of prehistoric archæology were satisfied that their nomenclature was correct. They are all triangular, the longest edge being thin and unworked, and this, it is suggested, was fixed in the side of a bone or wooden shaft, probably tipped by a triangular or tanged and barbed arrowhead. In most of the specimens the remaining two edges are carefully chipped, the longer being usually straight, and the shorter concave. This curved portion would be fixed pointing to the handle of the harpoon, the long sloping edge enabling the weapon to pierce the object aimed at, while the curved barb would prevent it slipping out.

In former parts of these “Proceedings” Dr. W. Allen Sturge, M.V.O., has put forward views concerning the striæ on surface implements, views which are so opposed to the canons of geology and archæology, and involve so great an upheaval of accepted beliefs, that but for the skill with which the facts and conclusions were marshalled, they would not have received a moment's consideration. Few archæologists have the material on which to form a reliable judgment, and fewer still are prepared to accept the upheaval of current views rendered necessary by the adoption of the theory that minor glaciations occurred after the deposition of the chalky boulder clay. Even more revolutionary was the view as to the occurrence of a glacial period at all and this was strenuously fought for many years, and even now is by no means accepted by all geologists. The drift deposits were referred to by old writers as “Extraneous Rubbish,” and were sometimes divided into Diluvium and Alluvium. It was not until 1840, when Agassiz read his paper before the Geological Society on “Glaciers, and the Evidence of their having once existed in Scotland, Ireland, and England,” that this momentous explanation of a vast and difficult problem was given to geologists, and years elapsed before it was generally accepted.

The determination of human flaking as against Nature's work upon flints has always been a vexed question with archæologists. It appeared apparently in the first place with the discovery of the Neolithic arrow-heads, as in some old books we find these relics described as “elf-darts,” which clearly proves that a supernatural origin was accorded to them. Though unfortunately we have no records of the discussions held over these first discovered Neoliths, we may I think assume that in those days the archæological camp was split into two sharply defined sections, one declaring that the arrow-heads were the outcome ot supernatural agencies, the other that some ancient race of men had fashioned them. Be that as it may, the fact remains that no such discussions have for many long years raged round these particular flaked flints, and they are now accepted as being as much evidences of man's work as is a dining-room table or a fireside arm-chair.

The Middle Glacial Sands and Gravel which occur over such a large portion of East Anglia are somewhat difficult to explain, and various opinions have been put forward to account for them. In Suffolk they generally occur under the Chalky Boulder Clay, and in some parts of Norfolk between that deposit and the older Contorted Drift. In the neighbourhood of Ipswich these deposits generally rest upon Red Crag, and are covered by the Chalky Boulder Clay. They are best seen where pits have been sunk upon the plateau or where streams have cut into the plateau and exposed the various beds composing it.

Having discovered six years ago that the Middle Glacial Gravel is implementiferous, I have continually searched these deposits, and am led to the following views regarding them.