Beedings Home Page

The Early Upper Palaeolithic site of Beedings is situated in West Sussex on the edge of the Lower Greensand scarp 4km north east of Pulborough. It is currently the site of Beedings Castle, a monumental late 19th century house built for the physician John Harley.

During the construction of the house a series of fissures were revealed within the underlying Rock. These contained a unique stone tool assemblage consisting of some 2,300 pieces. Through the work of Roger Jacobi (The British Museum) it is now thought that these tools are part of a distinctive group of old stone-age (Palaeolithic) tools. It is probable that these tools date to in excess of 35,000 years ago; an age which suggests either an early colonisation date for Britain by anatomically modern humans or occupation by technologically advanced and late surviving Neanderthals. Either scenario is exciting and of enormous significance for our understanding of the transition from Neanderthal to Modern Human populations in Northern Europe.

The Early Upper Palaeolithic site of Beedings is situated in West Sussex on the edge of the Lower Greensand scarp 4km north east of Pulborough. It is currently the site of Beedings Castle, a monumental late 19th century house built for the physician John Harley. During the construction of the house a series of fissures were revealed within the underlying Rock. These contained a unique stone tool assemblage consisting of some 2,300 pieces. Through the work of Roger Jacobi (The British Museum) it is now thought that these tools are part of a distinctive group of old stone-age (Palaeolithic) tools. It is probable that these tools date to in excess of 35,000 years ago; an age which suggests either an early colonisation date for Britain by anatomically modern humans or occupation by technologically advanced and late surviving Neanderthals. Either scenario is exciting and of enormous significance for our understanding of the transition from Neanderthal to Modern Human populations in Northern Europe.
.	In 2003 we established further fissures existed on the surface of Beedings Hill. Tracing these fissure-lines showed them to have originally extended under the house, making it likely that these were the features recorded as ‘gulls’ containing the stone tools. In the summer of 2007 three small trenches to the east of the house were dug to sample the underlying geology and to determine if further Palaeolithic remains were present. These excavatiosn revealed a portion of a major gull or fissure at the site. The Upper part of this fill contains paleolithic flintwork. The tools do not appear to be technologically similar to the Upper Palaeolithic blade assemblage known from the site. rather they seem, by their condition and hints from the technology to possibly relate to earlier, Middle Palaeoithic industries.

	While further traces of these sites will be looked for in the course of our work, it is the earliest evidence for human activity on the hill which will be our main focus of interest in the years ahead. The unique collection of stone tools offer a tantalising glimpse of our very ancient past. It seems, given the presence of broken projectile points, that they were left by a hunting party at a camp set high on the Greensand ridge at Beedings perhaps as much as 40,000 years ago. The hunting party chose the site for its view across the upper Arun valley which at that time was likely to have been open, marshy and cold steppe; home to migrating herds of mammoth, bison and woolly rhinoceros. From this camp herds could have been monitored while hunters mended and maintained their precious equipment. Perhaps from here hunting forays and scouting trips were undertaken. Further work on the hill this summer, funded through English Heritage, will be undertaken to try and date the site more accurately and to recover further artefacts under controlled scientific conditions. This work may help us eventually determine if the earliest Beeding hunters were the first of our own species to foray into Britain or the last tenacious survivors of the now extinct Neanderthal lineage. Over the course of the project the latest news and results can be followed here.