High Lodge Archaeology Site

Introduction

The site of High Lodge is situated in a disused clay pit in the Brecklands of Suffolk, UK. Artifacts were first discovered in the 1860s and were described together with the stratigraphy of the site by Sir John Evans (1872). He noted that at the base of the site lay glacial chalky boulder clay, which was overlain by red clay containing finely retouched scrapers. These in turn were overlain by sands and gravels containing handaxes, and boulder clay was also noted higher up the slope. Skertchley was the first to argue that this was a separate, stratigraphically higher boulder clay (Whittaker et al. 1891), which was controversial in the late nineteenth century as the pre-glacial antiquity of people had yet to be accepted.

A second controversy arose because the finely retouched scrapers were likened to those from Le Moustier in France (later termed Mousterian), while the overlying handaxes were typical of the earlier “drift” period or Lower Paleolithic. This inversion of the...