The town of Farnham is built upon a contiguous sequence of five Pleistocene terraces of the River Wey, labelled A–E from highest to lowest. The present river, in an incised valley with gravel terraces on both sides, flows through the town in an east-northeasterly direction, before looping south-eastwards and then turning northwards towards the Thames, its parent river, on a more easterly alignment. This course results from river capture by the Wey during the last glaciation: when the older terrace gravels at Farnham formed the valley floor it was as the uppermost reach of the Blackwater, a Loddon–Thames tributary that is nowadays confined to the area north of the Chalk escarpment.

The first report of palaeoliths from Farnham was in 1892 (Monkton & Mangles 1892), and historical records show that by the 1940s several thousand artefacts had been collected from numerous quarries at all terrace levels (Bury 1916; Wade 1927, 1935; Rankine 1935, 1947). The location of ~1200 Farnham palaeoliths was still known in 1968 (Roe 1968a). The original workers dated the artefacts based on different terrace schemes, according to their particular archaeological and geological biases, but all ultimately agreed that the deposits on each terrace contained a distinctive handaxes assemblage characterised by different key types.

While none of the terraces has been scientifically dated, and in the absence of fauna or opportunities to sample, lithostratigraphical and archaeological correlation with the Thames and other rivers still shows a cogent pattern (Oakley 1939). The highest and oldest terrace, Terrace A, sits at ~110m (360ft) above Ordnance Datum (aOD), the same height as the Alice Holt Plateau. It is much dissected, with spreads of pre-Anglian (>MIS 12) gravel cut by channels of different age (Wymer 1999). Hundreds of handaxes were collected from the gravel of Terrace A, including a group of crude artefacts (n=30) assigned by Roe (1968b) to his Early Acheulean Group V, alongside Fordwich and Warren Hill. A mix of other many other types have also been collected from Terrace A, presumably representing later channels or surface discards on what would become a high vantage point as the river cut down. The gravels of the next terrace, Terrace B, yielded a range of well-made ovate and pointed handaxes, the former including the distinctive twisted ovates known from the MIS 11 Boyn Hill-Orsett Heath terrace in the Thames Valley. Likewise Terrace C shows a dominance of pointed forms alongside cleavers and ficron handaxes, as found in the MIS 9 Lynch Hill-Corbets Tey formation at sites such as Furze Platt. Evidence of Levallois technique is found in Terrace C and D, while the brickearths of D have also produced handaxes of Middle Palaeolithic type. The percentage of rolled artefacts increases as one moved from Terrace A to D.

Reginald Smith described the Pleistocene sequence at Farnham as ‘perhaps as important as Swanscombe [the Thames]…and the Somme…for fixing the sequence of events and cultures in the Palaeolithic’. Unfortunately this potential has never been realised, and much work remains to be done establishing the range of artefacts and age of the deposits in the different pits. The sample on this database contains artefacts from Terraces A–D housed in the British Museum, most of which come from the Wade and Sturge Collections. The dates provided relate to the estimated ages for the terrace formations (for Terrace D backed up by an MIS 3 faunal assemblage). It must be remembered that the collections from each terrace are likely to contain a mix of contemporary materials, objects derived from higher terraces, and younger artefacts discarded on the terrace surfaces. It is anticipated that the much larger Bury collection, housed in Farnham Museum, which also benefits from detailed archival notebooks, will be added to the database in due course.

Bury, H. 1916. The Palaeoliths of Farnham. Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 27: 151–192.

Monkton, W.H. & Mangles, H. 1893. Excursion to Farnham. Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 13: 74–81.

Oakley, K.P. 1939. Part 1: geology and Palaeolithic studies, in Oakley, K.P., Rankine, W.F. & Lowther, A.W.G. (eds) A Survey of the Prehistory of the Farnham District. Guildford: Surrey Archaeological Society, p. 3–58.

Rankine, W.F. 1935. Discoveries in the gravels of the fifty-foot terrace at Farnham, Surrey. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 1: 148–149.

Rankine, W.F. 1947. Late Levallois point from C Terrace, Farnham. Surrey Archaeological Collection 54: 1–9.

Roe, D.A. 1968a. A Gazetteer of British Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Sites. Council for British Archaeology Research Report 8. London: Council for British Archaeology.

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

Wade, A.G. 1927. Palaeolith from Farnham. Antiquaries Journal 7: 313–314.

Wade, A.G. 1935. Palaeoliths from Farnham. Antiquaries Journal 15: 57–59.

Wymer, J. 1999. The Lower Palaeolithic Occupation of Britain. Salisbury: Trust for Wessex Archaeology.