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A Reappraisal of the Clacton Spearpoint

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2014

Kenneth P. Oakley ,
Peter Andrews ,
Lawrence H. Keeley  and
J. Desmond Clark
Kenneth P. Oakley
Affiliation:
British Museum (Natural History) Sub-Department of Anthropology
Peter Andrews
Affiliation:
British Museum (Natural History) Sub-Department of Anthropology
Lawrence H. Keeley
Affiliation:
Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre, University of Oxford
J. Desmond Clark
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

The wooden artifact widely known as the Clacton Spear (pl. 1) was discovered by Samuel Hazzledine Warren, F.G.S., in 1911. He dug it out of an undisturbed part of the freshwater sediments, probably a peaty seam, exposed on the foreshore at Clacton-on-Sea, c. 80 km ENE of London (Warren 1911; 1914, and in conversation with K.P.O. 1933). On 30th September 1911, Warren conducted a party of members of the Essex Field Club on a visit to see the outcrop of Pleistocene fluviatile deposits on the shore west of Clacton Pier, and in the brief report on this excursion, reference was made to the occurrence of fossil mammalia and Palaeolithic flint artifacts. At first Henri Breuil tentatively identified the worked flints with the Mesvinian industry of Belgium; but after Warren's amassment of a larger collection, he recognized that the Clacton flint artifacts represented a distinct Palaeolithic industry, or tradition, for which he proposed the name Clactonian (see Warren 1922 and 1926; Breuil 1932).

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society , Volume 43 , December 1977 , pp. 13 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © The Prehistoric Society 1977

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References

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