The site at Corfe Mullen lies on Terrace 12 of the Dorset Stour, a tributary of the ancient Solent River. Artefacts were recovered from three pits active between ~1900 and the 1940s—Railway Ballast Pit, Cogdean’s Pit and Sleight Pit—which were subject to contemporary investigations by the geologists Henry Bury (1933) and J.F.N. Green and local collector J.B. Calkin (Calkin & Green 1949). Recent desktop and field investigations by the Corfe Mullen Project (2005–2010: McNabb et al. 2011) have clarified the provenance of the extant artefacts.

Bury’s (1933) account of the geology at Railway Ballast Pit describes ~4m of fairly homogeneous gravel, becoming more loamy towards the top, citing quarry workers’ reports that the artefacts were concentrated towards the base. At Cogdean’s and Sleight Pit the gravel formed a bipartite sequence, a lower gravel and a contorted upper gravel, again with artefacts mostly from the gravels at the base. Due to their understanding of terrace formation and following contemporary practices that used handaxe typology as an indicator of age, Calkin and Green suggested that the Railway Ballast Pit contained material of different ages mixed together in terrace bluff slope deposits, which led Roe (1968) to omit the collection from his sample, using only handaxes from the terrace gravels at Cogdean’s Pit. While McNabb et al. (2011) make the case that Calkin and Green were mistaken in their interpretation of the geology and that some of the Railway Ballast artefacts came from genuine Terrace 12 fluvial gravel, the present sample cautiously follows Roe, using only artefacts from Cogdean’s and Slight Pits with a marked depth within the sequence.

Based on lithostratigraphy, terrace mapping and uplift modelling, Westaway et al. (2006) correlate Terrace 12 with the MIS 12 Anglian Glaciation, implying that the handaxes it contains are either contemporary or from earlier MIS 13 deposits.

Bury, H. 1933. The plateau gravels of the Bournemouth area. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 44: 314–335.

Calkin, J.B. & Green, J.F.N. 1949. Palaeoliths and terraces near Bournemouth. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 15: 21–37.

McNabb, J., Hosfield, R., Dearling, K., Barker, D., Strutt, K., Cole, J., Bates, M. & Toms, P. 2012. Recent work at the lower Palaeolithic site of Corfe Mullen, Dorset, England. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 78: 5–50.

Roe, D.A. 1968. British Lower Palaeolithic handaxe groups. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 34: 1–82.

Westaway, R., Bridgland, D. & White, M.J. 2006. The Quaternary uplift History of central southern England: evidence from the terraces of the Solent River system and nearby raised beaches. Quaternary Science Reviews 25: 2212–2250.