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The current geography of north-west Europe, from the perspective of long term Pleistocene climate change, is temporary. The seaways that separate southern Britain from northern France comprise a flooded landscape open to occupation by hunter-gatherers for large parts of the 0.5 million years since the English Channel's formation. While much of this record is now inaccessible to systematic archaeological investigation it is critical that we consider past human societies in the region in terms of access to, inhabitation in, and exploitation of this landscape.
This latest volume of the acclaimed Prehistoric Society Research Papers provides a starting point for approaching the Middle Palaeolithic record of the English Channel region and considering the ecological opportunities and behavioural constraints this landscape offered to Neanderthal groups in north-west Europe. Repeopling La Manche reviews the Middle Palaeolithic archaeological record along the fringes of La Manche in northern France and southern Britain. It examines this record in light of recent advances in quaternary stratigraphy, science-based dating, and palaeoecology and explores how Palaeolithic archaeology in the region has developed in an interdisciplinary way to transform our understanding of Neanderthal behaviour. Focusing in detail on a particular sub-region of this landscape, the Normano-Breton Gulf, Repeopling La Manche presents the results of recent research focused on exceptionally productive coastal capture points for Neanderthal archaeology. In turn the long-term behavioural record of La Cotte de St Brelade is presented and explored, offering a key to changing Neanderthal behaviour. Aspects of movement into and through these landscape, changing technological and raw material procurement strategies, hunting patterns and site structures are presented as accessible behaviours which change at site and landscape scales in response to changing climate, sea level and ecology over the last 250,000 years.
1. People, Place and Landscape: exploring La Manche
M. Pope
2. Archaeological sequences and framework of the Late Middle Pleistocene in northern France
D. Herrison
3. The early Middle Palaeolithic of the Normano-Breton Gulf
B. Scott
4. Pleistocene coastal sequences in the Normano-Breton Gulf
M. Bates
5. Neanderthals and Goldilocks: investigating hominin adaptations in the submerged landscapes of the Normano-Breton Gulf
R. Bates
6. Around the Channel in the Middle Pleistocene: biochronology and palaeoecology of the micro and large mammal fauna and the record from La Cotte de St Brelade
P. Auguste
7. Jersey’s North Facing Property: New Insight Into the Channel Neanderthals at La Cotte à La Chèvre
J. Mills
8. Capturing Neanderthals; La Cotte de St Brelade and the settlement history of the Normano-Breton Gulf
A. Shaw
9. La Cotte de St Brelade: In pursuit of the mammoth
K. Scott
10. Reconstructing and reinterpreting the La Cotte ‘bones heaps’
A. Shaw
11. Coming home: reconstructing place and landscape during the late Middle Pleistocene at La Cotte
A Shaw
12. Mind and society: reimagining the archaeology of Neanderthals
C. Gamble
Beccy Scott is a curator at the British Museum employed on the Pathways to Ancient Britain project, with a passion for all things Neanderthal. Following a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge she obtained her PhD at Durham on the Early Middle Palaeolithic of Britain, in the course of which she became an associate of Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project (AHOB). She is particularly interested in the development of classic Neanderthal behaviours during the earlier Middle Palaeolithic and especially the organisation of technological behaviour in the landscape.
Andrew Shaw works as a Palaeolithic specialist for Wessex Archaeology having obtained his PhD from Durham on the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic of Syria. Subsequently, as a member of Southampton University's Crossing the Threshold Project he focused on the Early Middle Palaeolithic material from La Cotte de St Brelade. His primary research interest is the reconstruction of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic technological decision making and human behaviour in relation to the varying landscapes and environmental contexts of the late Middle and Upper Pleistocene.
Katharine Scott is internationally recognised for her work on Middle and Upper Pleistocene vertebrate fossils. Her fieldwork at various Upper Thames Quaternary sites concentrated especially on the 10-year excavation of 200,000-year-old fossiliferous deposits at Stanton Harcourt near Oxford. This now comprises the largest collection of excavated mammoths in Britain. She is an Emeritus Fellow and Former Dean of Degrees at St Cross College, University of Oxford, and an Honorary Associate of the Oxford University Museum. She is the author of Mammoths and Neanderthals in the Thames Valley: Excavations at Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire (with Christine Buckingham, 2021).
Andrew Shaw works as a Palaeolithic specialist for Wessex Archaeology having obtained his PhD from Durham on the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic of Syria. Subsequently, as a member of Southampton University’s Crossing the Threshold Project he focused on the Early Middle Palaeolithic material from La Cotte de St Brelade. His primary research interest is the reconstruction of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic technological decision making and human behaviour in relation to the varying landscapes and environmental contexts of the late Middle and Upper Pleistocene.
