Santon Downham is located on the south (Suffolk) side of the Little Ouse River between Brandon and Thetford. Artefacts were first collected from local gravel pits by Henry Prigg and John Evans in 1865 (Prigg 1869; Evans 1872) and it soon became a focus for collectors. Sadly, little is known about the precise provenance of the existing artefacts, just that they came from the fluvial gravels at Santon Downham at ~22m above Ordnance Datum. Roe (1968) listed artefacts housed in Norwich Castle Museum as coming from Little Lodge Farm and Wymer (1985) used this information to identify a large disused pit c. 400m from the farm as ‘White’s Pit’, described as one of the pits exploited by Victorian collectors (Prigg 1869; Flower 1869).

Excavation of this pit in 1994–95 and 2018, however, was unable to locate the great depths of gravel alluded to by Evans and others, although a small assemblage (n = 28) of Acheulean artefacts was recovered (White 1997). Davis et al. (2024) further note that the sedimentary sequence within White’s Pit (a thin layer of chalky gravel ~40cm thick, overlying 3–4m of laminated lacustrine clays and an unknown depth of evenly-bedded sands) does not match that described by Evans (a gravel “of considerable thickness, so much so that in places caves of sufficient magnitude to allow a man standing inside have been formed within it, in consequence” of solution of the chalk)—the only deposits comparable to earlier descriptions were located in a borehole placed to the southeast of White’s pit and in small relict pits in Little Lodge Copse to the west.

Recent revision of the terrace stratigraphy of the Little Ouse River places White’s Pit and other ephemeral gravel workings on the highest, Warren Wood Terrace (Davis et al. 2024). This has been attributed, as part of a systematic valley-wide ESR and lithostratigraphical dating program, to MIS 11 (Davis et al. 2024); although the sand and gravel at Santon were unsuitable for ESR, leaving the date based on lithostratigraphic reasoning alone. Davis et al. (2024) have posited that the many of the artefacts actually came from the numerous relict gravel pits that pockmark the floor of Little Lodge Copse, located just to the west, and perhaps also other relict pits evident only on LIDAR images. While many are firmly in the Warren Wood terrace, some of the workings may have encroached upon sediments belonging to the third, Redhill Terrace (see Redhill and Broomhill). This mixing is probably the reason why Roe (1968) could only attribute his Santon Downham sample to this ‘intermediate’ Group IV.

The sample used for the current study totals 58 handaxes originating from the gravels of the Warren Wood Terrace at Santon Downham, the majority of which are housed in the British Museum. Comparison with the samples from Broomhill and Redhill should allow any materials originating from the lower terrace Redhill Terrace at Santon Downham to be separated from the main MIS 11 sample.

Davis, R., Lewis, S.G., Hatch, M., Ashton, N., Voinchet, P., Bahain, J.J., Dale, L., Foulds, F., Rawlinson, A. & White, M. 2024. A revised terrace stratigraphy and chronology for the Little Ouse River as a framework for interpreting the late Lower and early Middle Palaeolithic of central East Anglia, UK. Quaternary Environments and Humans 2: 100045.

Evans, J. 1872. Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain. First Edition. London: Longmans & Co.

Flower, J.W. 1869. On some recent discoveries of flint implements of the Drift in Norfolk and Suffolk, with observations on the theories accounting for their distribution. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 25: 449–460.

Prigg, H. 1869. The discovery of associated works of man, and the remains of the Elephant, etc., in the gravel near Thetford. The Quarterly Journal of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History 1: 3–5.

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

White, M.J. 1997. Investigations of an earlier Palaeolithic site at White’s Pit, Santon Downham, Suffolk, 1994–5. Lithics 17: 9–14.

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