This is an important publication. While it might seem at first glance to be just another excavation monograph (with an overlong title) describing a couple of small flint-scatter sites, this would be to underestimate its significance. There are four chapters here, two of which are excavation reports.
The first report (pp.9–54), by Phil Jones and Lyndon Cooper, concerns ‘A Creswellian flint scatter at Wey Manor Farm, Addlestone, Surrey’. This was an in situ and apparently virtually uncontaminated scatter of 371 Creswellian flint artefacts, one of the very few such open-air sites to be discovered in Britain. A commercial rescue excavation was undertaken in 2004 in advance of sand and gravel extraction, and the results now fully published thanks to funding via the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund. Jones describes the background circumstances and the actual excavation, and comments on the evidence for hearths, while Simon Armitage provides a specialist report on OSL dating and Chris Green et al look at geomorphology, site formation and landscape context. The ‘meat in the sandwich’ is provided by Lyndon Cooper, who gives a succinct yet masterly analysis and discussion of the flint assemblage, accompanied by 12 pages of invaluable flint illustrations, and by the contribution of Randolph Donahue and Adrian Evans on lithic microwear and refit analysis. Apart from various technological pointers, the presence of Cheddar and other angle-backed points confirms the Creswellian attribution, while the refits and uniform raw material confirm the homogeneity.
The second report (pp.55–98), ‘Two Late Glacial hunting camps at Church Lammas, Staines’, by Phil Jones, John Lewis and James Rackham, covers two clusters of flint debris, in this case unfortunately disturbed before excavation in 1995 and much less coherent than the Wey Manor Farm scatter. Again, as described by Jones, the work was necessitated by gravel extraction, but in this case supported by English Heritage following on from earlier commercial excavation at this location. Jones provides the account of the excavation, including the investigation of several hollows which proved to be natural, although one provided an interesting early Holocene pollen sequence. The flints are analysed and discussed this time by John Lewis, very appropriately since the typological indicators point to comparability with his own nearby Late Glacial/Early Holocene site at Three Ways Wharf, upstream on the River Colne. The two clusters were 65m apart and probably of different date: Scatter 1 consisted of 245 flint artefacts, Scatter 2 of 71, and a further 294 were unstratified/spoil finds.
The presence of faunal remains at both of the Church Lammas clusters would normally be a huge bonus but, as James Rackham points out, the bones are so fragmentary and poorly preserved that their value is rather limited beyond providing the important information that both horse and reindeer are represented at Scatter 1. This confirms the indicators from the flint artefacts that the cluster there is Late Glacial and to be equated with the Long Blade horizon at the very end of the Pleistocene. The Scatter 2 bones also seem to point to a Late Glacial date, leading to an interesting divergence of specialist opinion, since John Lewis in the lithic analysis favoured an Early Holocene Mesolithic context. Regrettably the bones had insufficient organic content for radiocarbon dating.
In the final chapter (pp.99–106) Paul Pettitt, Marcy Rockman and Simon Chenery record a potentially very important experimental development in lithic analysis studies. LA-ICP-MS trace element analysis was used to investigate the source region of the flint utilized at Church Lammas and Wey Manor Farm. The authors stress this is a preliminary, interim study, but the tentative results suggest a Salisbury Plain area origin for the Wey Manor Farm Creswellian finds, and an East Anglian source for the Church Lammas material. Clearly this is a key area of applied research for lithic studies that requires and merits further resourcing to fulfil its potential. The inclusion of this study here is a bit of a coup, but the work behind it now needs wider dissemination via a peer-reviewed journal.
So far, readers of this review might feel I am reviewing enthusiastically a publication which is of considerable specialist value, but not perhaps of any direct relevance to the majority of archaeological fieldworkers, managers and curators. All, however, would benefit from reading the initial chapter (pp.1–7) by Phil Jones on ‘The discovery of lowland Upper Palaeolithic sites’. Here Jones considers current evaluation and excavation procedures in commercial archaeology and why they are unsuited to the recovery of Upper Palaeolithic sites (indeed most early prehistoric sites), and offers his thoughts on strategies for improvement. The Upper Palaeolithic heritage of the UK is an inadequately known and precious resource and it is rather surprising that so few sites such as those described here have come to light in the UK over the past several decades of commercial archaeological work. I hope Phil Jones’s welcome attempt to raise a debate on this issue will not fall on deaf ears.