The Elveden brickpit is located in the Breckland region of East Anglia, 5km southwest of Thetford. It was opened in 1897 and in operation until World War I, during which time a large number of handaxes were recovered by collectors. Subsequent excavations by Paterson (Paterson & Fagg 1940) and the British Museum (Ashton et al. 2005) have clarified the context of the assemblage. The stratigraphy at Elveden consists of a depression in the Chalk mantled by Lowestoft Till (MIS 12) and infilled with a sequence of fluvio-lacustrine silty-clays, gravel and ‘brickearth’ (Ashton et al. 2005). A pollen sequence from the base of the lacustrine beds indicates the contemporary climate was cool with open vegetation growing in poorly drained habitats, giving way to coniferous woodland dominated by birch and pine. Molluscan fauna from the upper part of the lake sequence signals the development of fully temperate conditions, with woodland around the edges of the basin; vertebrates remains are sparse although thermophilous fish were recovered. The lacustrine succession was tentatively correlated with pollen zones HoI–HoII of the Hoxnian (MIS 11c) interglacial (Ashton et al. 2005), an attribution supported by amino acid racemisation (Penkmen et al. 2011).

Lower Palaeolithic archaeology from Elveden comes from two contexts, a black clay (palaeosol) and coarse gravel, which overly the lake sequence at the margins of the basin (Ashton et al. 2005). Stratigraphically they represent lateral variations in a single pene-contemporaneous land-surface, with the gravel taking the form of a fluvially-winnowed ‘cobble band’, indicating that the site had by this time become part of a fluvial drainage network. Roe attributed the Elveden handaxes to Group VI, sub-group B.

Ashton, N., Lewis, S., Parfitt, S., Candy, I., Keen, D., Kemp, R., Penckman, K., Thomas, G., Whittaker, J. & White, M.J. 2005. Excavations at the Lower Palaeolithic site at Elveden, Suffolk, UK. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 71: 1–61.

Paterson, T.T. & Fagg, B.E.B. 1940. Studies in the Palaeolithic succession in England II: the Upper Brecklandian Acheul (Elveden). Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 6: 1–29.

Penkman, K.E., Preece, R.C., Bridgland, D.R., Keen, D.H., Meijer, T., Parfitt, S.A., White, T.S. & Collins, M.J. 2011. A chronological framework for the British Quaternary based on Bithynia opercula. Nature 476: 446–449.