The recent discovery of Palaeolithic handaxes in the North Sea has underlined the link between aggregate dredging and archaeology.
To help let aggregate companies know where prehistoric remains might be found, and to target new surveys, Wessex Archaeology has been looking again at old records of artefacts found at sea and on the coast.
Often, little of the information about such discoveries was recorded at the time because people were not so interested in marine archaeology. Today, this information can be very valuable, once it has been tidied up in a way that can be easily accessed through computerised records.
Wessex Archaeology’s ALSF project Artefacts from the Sea concentrated on making information about old discoveries more easily available through the National Monuments Record (the NMR, maintained by English Heritage) and through Historic Environment Records (HERs, maintained by local authorities).
Our project looked at two areas: the Yorkshire coast between the Humber and the Tees, and the Solent in southern England. Records of hundreds of discoveries were added or improved in each area.
As well as re-examining finds made at the coast, the project also catalogued a very important collection of prehistoric finds held by fisherman Michael White. Almost 300 finds from 59 different places in the Solent were catalogued, ranging from the Lower Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age.
The Artefacts from the Sea project successfully demonstrated the value of re-examining previous discoveries as a cost-effective way of improving our knowledge of the likely presence of prehistoric material offshore.
Our new pages detailing the methods and results of the project can be found here.
