NHER 12509 (Find Spot record) - Unprovenanced Palaeolithic flint handaxe and butchered bison bone, ?foreshore (Happisburgh, poorly located)

September 1930. Stray Find.
Findspot not recorded - possibly on beach as flint looks rolled:
1 Palaeolithic ovate flint handaxe. 144mm long, 97mm maximum width, 35mm maximum thickness. Slightly S-twisted. See drawing (S1).
Held by Norwich Castle Museum (NWHCM : L1977.2), on loan from Sussex Archaeological Society, ex Barbican Museum, Lewes (No. 1959.4).
Information from (S2).
This handaxe is also noted in (S3), (S4), (S5) and (S6), although no additional information is given.
Amended by P. Watkins (HES), 23 July 2014.

Various museums hold fossils and other material that is recorded as being from Cromer Forest-bed deposits on the foreshore at Happisburgh. These ancient deposits are exposed intermittently along this part of the East Anglian coastline, their name coming from the preserved tree stumps that became visible when they were first exposed. The Forest-bed deposits lie beneath till deposits associated with the Anglian glaciation (which saw Norfolk and much of the rest of Britain covered by a massive ice sheet) and are therefore at least 0.5 million years old. These highly organic deposits formed during comparatively warmer periods on the floodplains of ancient rivers and have been found to contain a variety of vertebrate remains including the bones of various extinct species. The chronological significance of the Forest-bed deposits has long been recognised and for over 150 years they have been searched for evidence of pre-Anglian human activity. Despite this activity a handaxe found on the foreshore at Happisburgh in 2000 was the indisputable artefact to be recovered from the Forest-bed deposits (NHER 35385). This find generated considerable excitement as a result but it is not actually the first evidence to be identified for human activity to be discovered within these deposits, for in 1999 a cut-marked bison bone had been identified by Simon Parfitt within a collection of Forest-bed vertebrate fossils. This bone was part of a large number of specimens that had been found by local collector A. C. Savin during the late 19th-century and sold to the Natural History Museum in 1897. According to an accompanying catalogue this bone had been collected at Happisburgh, being found within a foreshore exposure of the Forest-bed north of Cart Gap. It is a foot bone from one the hind limbs of a bison and has multiple, deeply-incised cut marks. The position of the cut marks is consistent with dismemberment.
See published article (S7) for further details.

Archaeological excavations at the site where the handaxe was discovered (now designated Happisburgh Site 1) have now recovered nearly 300 relatively undisturbed worked flints and a wide range of palaeoenvironmental evidence. Significantly, a number of the animal bones recovered display evidence for butchery in the form of either cut marks or breakage patterns typically associated with marrow extraction. It is therefore quite likely that this site was the source of Savin’s bison bone. The date of Happisburgh 1 remains somewhat contentious, although the archaeological evidence suggests that the artefacts were early as initially thought, being most likely associated with occupation around 500,000 years ago.
See NHER 35385 for further details.

P. Watkins (HES), 23 July 2014.