NHER 1145 (Monument record) - Mesolithic flint artefacts and Middle Saxon inhumations at Gasworks Pit

Gasworks Pit, Hunstanton.

Flint tools from 'the brown Hessle boulder clay in a pit on the cliffs in south Hunstanton'
See (S1).
From this layer they should be Upper Palaeolithic, but in appearance and type could easily be Mesolithic.
E. Rose (NAU).

These are part of the same find as the flints in Ipswich Museum where they are described as 'from the Brown Boulder Clay underlying the Marsh Beds and Sand Dunes'. Two sites are given in the literature 'South of the South end of the Promenade' and 'the large pit northwest of the gas works'. These in fact are virtually adjacent and apparently parts of the same site.
Types include: pushplanes, double ended scrapers, burins, blades, blade scrapers, cores, simple burins and blades with worked edges.

The finds in the Ipswich Museum were examined by R. Jacobi and are listed in (S4) as 1 blade core, 1 flake core, 1 scraper, 1 microlith and a number of blades/blade fragments.

In 1862 in 'the gravel pit cut into the hill south of the railway station', at a depth of 15 feet (4.5m), human bones were found. They were given to [1], who still had them in 1897 when at the same site, now only 6 feet (1.8m) deep, [2] uncovered a skeleton - some of the previously found bones belonged to it. They were given to Ipswich Museum by Haslemere Museum who called them Upper Palaeolithic.
R.R. Clarke (NCM) said that a photograph taken in 1898 suggested a straight sided grave cut from the surface though covered by a (bleached) layer; the date was quite uncertain.
Radiocarbon dating suggests that the Ipswich Museum skeleton is in fact Middle Saxon. Authors of (S2) believe it has no connection with the earlier find of bones.
See article (S2) in file.
E. Rose (NLA), 15 December 1993.

J. Wymer notes that source [1] also found a Mesolithic microlith.
E. Rose (NLA), 18 June 1996.

List of references and report (S2) in file.
E. Rose (NLA).