Boxgrove Palaeolithic site

Boxgrove Quarry is a gravel quarry and Lower Palaeolithic archaeological site at Boxgrove in the English county of West Sussex.

Parts of the site complex were excavated between 1983 and 1996 by a team led by Mark Roberts of University College London. The site is situated in an area that features a buried chalk cliff that overlooked a flat beach (which contained a waterhole) stretching around 1km south to the sea.

The site is important for many reasons, including the degree of preservation of the landscape, the impressive size of the undisturbed ancient land surface, its huge quantity of well-preserved animal bones, its numerous flint artifacts, and its hominin bones which are among some of the most ancient found yet in Europe. Several of the animal bones are the oldest found specimens of their species, such as the the wing bone of the Great Auk found at the site in 1989. The combination of bones, stone artifacts, and the geology of the landscape gives a very complete picture of the coastal plain as it existed half a million years ago.

Numerous Acheulean flint tools and remains of animals dating to around 500,000 years ago were found at the site. Some of the bones were found to display cut marks, and some of the tools bear use wear traces indicative of cutting meat, indicating that the site was used for butchery by some of the earliest occupants of the British Isles. They shared the area with a wide variety of animals whose bones have been found there, including lions, bears, rhinos and giant deer, as well as numerous smaller animals such as frogs, voles and birds. Comparison with ethnographic and experimental examples of stone-tool-assisted butchery has shown that game animals at Boxgrove were expertly butchered, and it is likely that the variety of animal life in the area attracted human hunters. Evidence for hunting is, however, tentative, consisting primarily of a horse shoulderblade with a semicircular hole that has been interpreted as a projectile impact mark. No obvious hunting equipment has been found.

Remains of Homo heidelbergensis were first found on the site in 1994, comprising the partial tibia of a male who probably stood 1.8m high and weighed around 80 kg. Significantly, this is the only postcranial hominid bone to have been found in Northern Europe (in other words, coming from anywhere other than the skull). Both ends of the bone show signs of gnawing, possibly by a wolf, suggesting that perhaps the Boxgrove hominids were sometimes prey to other animals. In 1996 two incisor teeth from another individual were found. These show evidence of severe periodontal disease and show tool cut marks, which are thought to have been caused by use of flint tools near the mouth rather than indicate cannibalism.

In 2003 English Heritage announced it would buy the remains of the quarry to ensure the preservation of the site complex.