Purfleet is located in the Lower Thames valley, 20km east of central London. Since the 1960s, Middle Pleistocene deposits have been exposed in several commercial pits (from east to west): Bluelands Pit, Greenlands Pit, Esso Pit and Botany Pit. Investigations at Botany Pit were conducted by Andrew Snelling (Wymer 1985), while Bluelands and Greenlands were excavated by Palmer (1975) and Danielle Schreve (Schreve et al. 2002; Bridgland et al. 2013). The Purfleet deposits are now interpreted as representing an abandoned meander loop of the main River Thames (Bridgland 1994; Schreve et al. 2002), rather than the Mar Dyke, a tributary that joins the Thames at Purfleet (Wymer 1968, 1985; Palmer 1975; Gibbard 1994). On the basis of litholostratography, biostratography and amino acid racemisation age estimates, the deposits at Purfleet have been correlated with the Corbets Tey/Lynch Hill Formation, spanning MIS10–9–8 (Bridgland 1994; Schreve et al. 2002; Penkman et al. 2011); the MIS 9 interglacial is, in fact, often informally called the Purfleet Interglacial, and the distinctive mammalian suite has been designated the type for the Purfleet MAZ (Schreve 2001; Schreve et al. 2002).

The sequence at Greenlands and Bluelands Pits represents the edge of a substantial channel, up to 1km wide and 5m deep, flowing adjacent to a steeply sloping river cliff cut in Chalk. The geological and archaeological sequence at Greenlands and Bluelands is summarised in the table below. The deposits are tripartite, with three broadly fining-upwards sequences, with each containing a different archaeological industry, a non-handaxe Clactonian in the basal Little Thurrock Member, an Acheulean with handaxes in the Bluelands Member, and a core-assemblage based on a ‘proto-Levallois’ technology (White et al. 2024). The sediments at Botany Pit consist of some 3.4m of sand and gravel banked up against a Chalk river-cliff and are interpreted as the upper part of the complete Purfleet sequence, equivalent to Bed 6 and 8 and dating to late MIS 9/early MIS 8. Equivalent deposits in the neighbouring Greenlands Pit have provided an averaged age of 324,000 years by optically stimulated luminescence (White & Ashton 2003; Bridgland et al. 2013).

Bridgland, D.R. 1994. Quaternary of the Thames. London: Chapman and Hall.

Bridgland, D., Harding, P., Allen, P., Candy, I., Cherry, C., Horne, D., Keen, D., Penkman, K., Preece, R., Rhodes, E., Scaife, R. Schreve, D., Schwenninger, J.-L., Slipper, I., Ward, G., White, M., White, T., and Whittaker, J. 2013. An enhanced record of MIS9 environments, geochronology and geoarchaeology: data from construction of the High Speed 1 (London-Channel Tunnel) rail link and other recent investigations at Purfleet, Essex, UK. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 124: 417–476.

Gibbard, P.L. 1994. The Pleistocene History of the Lower Thames Valley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Palmer, S. 1975. A Palaeolithic site at North Road, Purfleet, Essex. Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society 7: 1–13.

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

Schreve, D.C. 2001a. Differentiation of the British late Middle Pleistocene interglacials: the evidence from mammalian biostratigraphy. Quaternary Science Reviews 20: 1693–1705.

Schreve, D.C., Bridgland, D.R., Allen, P., Blackford, J.J., Gleed-Owen, C.P., Griffiths, H.I., Keen, D.H. & White, M.J. 2002. Sedimentology, palaeontology and archaeology of late Middle Pleistocene River Thames terrace deposits at Purfleet, Essex, UK. Quaternary Science Reviews 21: 1423–1464.

White, M.J. & Ashton, N.M. 2003. Lower Palaeolithic core technology and the origins of the Levallois method in NW Europe. Current Anthropology 44: 598–609.

White, M., Rawlinson, A., Foulds, F., Dale, L., Davis, R., Bridgland, D., Shipton, C. & Ashton, N. 2024. Making a U-turn on the Purfleet Interchange: Stone Tool Technology in Marine Isotope Stage 9 Britain and the Emergence of the Middle Palaeolithic in Europe. Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology 7: 1–23.

Wymer, J. 1968. Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology in Britain as Represented by the Thames Valley. London: John Baker.

Wymer, J.J. 1985. Palaeolithic Sites of East Anglia. Norwich: Geobooks.