Stoke Newington lies immediately west of the River Lea in northeast London, at 27m above Ordnance Datum. Primary context artefacts were first discovered by Worthington George Smith in 1878, when house construction work north of Stoke Newington Common opened large sections in former fields and market-gardens (Smith 1878, 1884; Greenhill 1884). This ‘palaeolithic floor’ was later re-discovered by Warren in Geldeston Road (Roe 1981), but all subsequent attempts to locate it have failed.

The deposits at Stoke Newington lie on the Lynch Hill Terrace near the confluence of the Lea and the Thames. On the basis of lithostratigraphy, biostratigraphy and amino-acid racemisation they have been correlated with the MIS 9 interglacial (Green et al. 2004, 2006; Penkman et al. 2011). The geology recorded by Smith shows London Clay immediately overlain by ochreous gravel with abraded artefacts and bones. Above this lay 2–3m of fine, buff-coloured sands (the Stoke Newington Sands; Green et al. 2006) containing terrestrial and freshwater molluscs, within and atop of which Smith’s ‘floor’ occurred as a band of subangular ochreous gravel up to 15cm thick or as a mere colour contrast. The sequence was capped by a colluvial brickearth. Smith (1884) record 45 species of mollusc and 24 species of mammal from the sands and the lower gravel, including the biostratigraphically significant taxa Corbicula fluminalis and Belgrandia marginata.

The present sample consists of fresh condition handaxes recovered from the ‘floor’ horizon north of Stoke Newington Common. There are known biases in the collections introduced by Smith, who gave the largest and ‘best’ specimens to distinguished colleagues, such as John Evans (White 2023). These biases can be corrected for to some extent by using those handaxes collected by other antiquarians such as Warren and Greenhill.

Green, C.P., Gibbard, P.L. & Bishop, B.J. 2004. Stoke Newington: geoarchaeology of the Palaeolithic ‘floor’. Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 115: 193–208.

Green, C.P., Branch, N.P., Coope, G.R., Field, M.H., Keen, D.H., Wells, J.M., Schwenninger, J.-L., Preece, R.C., Schreve, D.C., Canti, M.G. & Gleed-Owen, C. 2006. Marine Isotope Stage 9 environments of fluvial deposits at Hackney, north London, UK. Quaternary Science Reviews 25: 89–113.

Greenhill, J.E. 1884. The Implementiferous Gravels of Northeast London. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 8: 336–343.

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.

Roe, D. 1981. The Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Periods in Britain. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Smith, W.G. 1878. On Palaeolithic Implements from the Valley of the Lea. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 8: 275–279.

Smith, W.G. 1884. On a Palaeolithic Floor at North-East London. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 13: 357–384.

White, M.J. 2023. Class, collectors and conflict at the Lower Palaeolithic discovery at Stoke Newington, 1878–1884. World Archaeology 54: 516–527.