 Ymgrifennu, o unig gaelwch, gweithio stîl ar gyfer? Rwy'n gwybod dim yn ôl, i'n gofynnig ar gyfer. Rwy'n gweithio, John Lewis, Ysgrifenech chi gyda'r Sbyddiadol Ysgrifennu ac ymdweithi ni i'w gweithio'i partwy o yredd ymddangos. Rwy'n gwybod ddod i'n gweithio'r society, i'w mynd i ddweud i'r wneud… …cymdeilio'r gorfa o ysgrifennu yn ceirio'i ar hedge. Rwy'n gweithio i arplynol a'r rhaglau cymrygylidol, Mae'r hollwch yn gwahanol mwy gwael yn ei ddebyg, ac mae'n gweithio'r hollwch yn meddorol ... .. ac yn ceimdoedd mewn mynd i chi yn cyhoeddur hynny. Mae hynny'n gwahanol, yma, 500 ac mae'n hollwch yno, yna yn gweithio y llyfr o fwy gael y mae'r hollwch... .. ond mae hwn oedd wedi'u wneud yma sydd eich mwyaf gyda'i hanfod. Yn hynny, rydych chi'n fryd ei wneud couldwch rydych chi enw ar科wch. Rydych i'n dweud o'r hosesio. Mae hynny'n wahanol sydd o'r ddweud o'r llwyddon ymddangos i'r ddweud. Dyna hi'n ddod yn fwyaf, ac mae'n ddweud o'r ddod, yn ymddiadau sy'n ei ddod, a'n ddod i'n ddod i'r ddod ymddiad, ac mae'n meddwl i'r ddod o'r statiw gyda Joshua Reynolds, dw i'r ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod. Yn y troi, mae'r ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod, Mae'r rhaglenau yn y dda-ddo'r lwg â'n lwybu. A'r rhaglenau yn y dda-ddo'r lwbu, yn y ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud. Rwy'n gwneud ar y cyflodd hwnnw, mae'n meddwl o'r cyflodd hwnnw. Rwy'n meddwl am y cyflodd hwnnw. Mae'n meddwl o'r cyflodd hwnnw. Mae'r âl o'r ysgrifennu, er mwyn o'r cyd-dweud yma. Ond rwyf wedi'i gweithio'r cyflawn i'r gweithio'r argylcheddau ac y gweithgau'r ysgolig yw'r cyd-dweud. Mae'r cyd-dweud eich cyd-dweud eich cyd-dweud. Mae'n adnod o'r cyd-dweud o'r cyd-dweud. Ond o'r cyd-dweud o'r cyd-dweud, mae'n cyd-dweud o'r cyd-dweud. Diolch i'r afael o'r cyd-dweud dros os nesaf o'r cyd-dweud. Mae'n cyd-dweud. Mae'n cyd-dweud o'r cyd-dweud yn cael hwy, a yng nghylch yn i'r ffordd o'i gweithio i ni yw'r cyd-dweud o'r cyd-dweud yw'r cyd-dweud ar rai ohono oed. Y dyfodol yma, ac mae'r cyd-dweud yn cael gweithio'r cyd-dweud, yn cyrceblio gyda'r cyd-dweud, yn ceisio eich cyd-dweud fydd yna. And I think it's rather like watching our children grow up actually, we didn't really notice our children getting bigger and growing up. But our relatives who saw them less frequently every time they'd visit they would always say, gosh haven't they grown? And I think if you sort of come in and out of the period you realise just how things changed and changed quite rapidly in time certainly when I was an archaeologist. Efo'r dweud yr ysgol i ddechrau'n ddiwedd i dwwedd ar gyfer y pethau, ac mae'n ddweud y ddim yn bwysig i ddweud y cwrdd, Mac Pope a Clive Gamble. Mae'n ddweud yr ysgol i ddysgu'r famy sydd wedi ddegwyd gyda'r ddwylo i'r ddigonol diolpeth honno i'w gwathio ar gyfer argyflwydd post-terps, a'r PbG-16, at a time of enormous financial and political pressure on the enabling mechanisms for commercial and research archaeology in England. This struck a chord elus at the society because we have been concerned about the wider issue of how a local government's spending cuts are weakening the mechanisms for protecting and investigating heritage resources, ..on cymell yw'r dysgu sy'n rhoi rhywbeth ar gyfer y dweud yn fawr yn ymgyrchol iawn. Mae'n fawr i'r ffawr yn ddechrau sy'n ddechrau i'r cwrdd y bwrdd ac yn ymgyrchol... ..y gydag, mae'n meddwl yw'r cymell ymgyrchol ar gyfer cyfnodol ar gyfer gyfrifedigol... ..y'r ddweud yn llwyddoedd ar y ddweud. Yn yma ynghylch 2013, y ffaith yw'r dweud o'r ddweud o'r bywyr... Berlington House on behalf of the Archaeology Forum on Local Government Archaeological Provision. The debate is on our website and YouTube and it's rather interesting, it's interesting watching. This debate gave rise to the Reed Sale Howell inquiry into provision of archaeological advice to local government. Unfortunately the report still hasn't been published. However the society's evidence again which is on our website to the inquiry clearly set out that we believe that there is an opportunity for radical reform of the entire system and a move to provision of archaeological advice at a regional level with regional statutory HGRs linked to form a single national historic environment record. As we are seeing in certain areas of England there are already ad hoc moves to regionalise provision or indeed lack of provision driven by local government spending cuts rather than a planned transformation based on archaeological needs and considerations of public engagement. The society is therefore happy to host a conference which explores how a period focused archaeological discipline addresses changing policy frameworks and methodological practices, challenges which are also facing the rest of English archaeology. If there are trends issues and most importantly solutions that emerge from today are the more broadly applicable then the conference will not only have been good for paleolithic archaeology but the practice of archaeology of all periods in England. So enough of me and I will hand over to the chair of the first session Professor Danielle Shrew. Good morning everybody. It gives me great pleasure to chair the first session of this conference and indeed no more appropriate venue could we find than the Society of Antiquaries for this particular meeting. So the format for these sessions will be that each speaker is given up to 15 minutes to make their presentations and that will be followed by a panel discussion. So if I could ask you in the audience to hold your questions until that panel discussion and then we'll open the floor to questions. So the first session is New Horizons in the British Paleolithic and we have three speakers who will be presenting their own views on where we've got to and indeed what New Horizons lie ahead. So it gives me pleasure to ask the first speaker to come up. That's Nick Ashton from the British Museum and he will be talking on behalf also of his co-authors Simon Parfit and Simon Lewis. Thank you and good morning. I'm not sure where the title came from but I imagined that it was meant to push me in the direction of talking about some of the earlier sites that we've been discovering mainly around the coast. Most of you are probably aware over the last 15 years there have been huge changes in our understanding of the earliest humans in northern Europe. Most of this has been concentrated on sites in Norfolk and Suffolk particularly around the coast where huge coastal erosion is bringing up new information all the time. So the talk is really going to be focused on those areas and it's involved a large number of people and the two most significant I think are Simon Lewis and Simon Parfit so I'm speaking on their behalf. One of the main sites that was first discovered in 2000 was the site of Paikfield and I won't say anything really about that. But I want to really concentrate on the work that's been taking place around Haysborough and in fact we now know that we've probably got five different sites one of which you'll see is out to sea. That's not the actual location of the site it's probably somewhere further east than that and we're still really trying to locate it. This is some of the work that's been going on to try and locate Wearsight 5 with colleagues Justin Dicks, Fraser Sturt and Rachel Bino and I promise Rachel next to five minutes later on in the afternoon to give her the five minutes to talk more about that work. Moving on very quickly it's really just to summarise some of the findings. Haysborough site one that was again discovered in 2000, we worked there 2004 and then with the Dutch team from Leiden between 2009 and 2012 I think. This site we think dates to about 500,000, contains handnaxes, also contains cut mart bone. But the site of real focus has been Haysborough site three and this has really extended our time range back we think to either 850,000 years or possibly even 950,000 years. So this has extended the time range of humans in Northern Europe, not just North or South or Britain, but Northern Europe by staggering at least 350,000 years. So this really has changed one of our main parameters to work with and associated with the site is a simple flake and core industry, a few flake tools and amazing range of environmental information that allows us to ask questions about human habitats. And associated with those deposits were the footprints that were first discovered with Martin Bates and Brother Richard and Simon, both Simons back in 2013, these were published the following year. So these are the earliest human footprints outside Africa. It's not really that work that I want to concentrate on, but it's really a project part funded by English heritage or historic England, as we now call it. And this was both a monitoring program and a program to try and understand better the onshore offshore links between the sediments that we're finding. Very briefly on the monitoring project, we've had a certain amount of success in trying to engage local collectors. We've held fossil road shows and the two particular individuals are Darren Joe Nicholas, who really should be here today actually, who discovered by going down twice weekly, not only at the reporting back new deposits that are emerging, but they're also collecting amazing quantities of artifacts and fossils, not just from Hosebro, but from a range of sites along that stretch of coast. And just taking Hosebro alone, we found 80 artifacts through 400m squares of excavation and they found staggering 159, most of which are on the surface, but almost certainly coming from those same deposits. That particular part of the project has worked very well, but we do need to continue working on ways of monitoring these coastlines in a better way. None of us have got the time to be up there constantly, so we need to engage the local collectors, the local population to report those finds back. This is beginning to emerge in this way and we've equipped these particular pair with a camera with GPS, so we have both a photographic record and a location for the finds that have been discovered. The other part of the work, in fact the main part of the work, has been a programme of geophysics. I've just talked to Martin Bates, who's out of the back now, with brother Richard. They covered an astonishing 20km transects in the Hosebro area. Alongside that, to ground truth those geophysical transects, none of which I really understand, so if there are any questions on that, I'm sure Martin can answer them later. There's been extensive calling programme and I think our own calling work, 34 new calls have been put down, some from the cliff top, some on the beach, some with greater success than others, but stabbing 34 boreholes, this is with Simon Lewis and Peter Hall, and with both these methods we've got a better idea of the distribution of the channel systems that are coming out at Hosebro. This is a map put together by Simon Lewis and you can see the two channel systems. This is above site 3, quite a wide channel we think, and this is above site 1, a much narrower channel. So we've got some idea of where they're heading inland and where the threat is likely to be in the future. Perhaps of even greater interest is the estimates of where the coastline will be in subsequent years. So we've taken, or Simon's taken, historic mapping, current day mapping, Google Earth imagery to show where the coastline is today and where it has been in the past. But there's also a shoreline management plan that was published, I think, in 2007, which shows their estimates of where the coastline will be in 2030, 2055 and 2105. I imagine none of us will be around to see that. I hope not anyway. That in itself provides a way of thinking about how we deal with these coastline sediments and I think this is particularly informative. Again, this is put together by Simon Lewis. It shows the areas that have been eroded during particular time periods. So you can see between 1890 and 1994, virtually nothing by comparison to what was happening in subsequent years. And the important thing I think for the future is if you take the period 2015 to 2030, and these are obviously the next 14 years, the actual erosion over the site 1 area is under threat. Seem to be based on these figures comparatively small, but for site 3 it's immense. And this really, I think, highlights where we need to put our resources in the future and think of ways of dealing with this resource in probably better ways. And I think this is the discussion that we had with the panel later on. Just to provide a slightly wider context, beyond Haysborough, Haysborough is one small dot on the map. We've got the whole of that coastline to think about. And the black areas around that coastline show where the chromophores bed deposits, deposits that we're dealing with, extend around the coast. I think understanding those sequences is highly important for understanding where human evidence is likely to be. So there's a huge amount of work to be done beyond the immediate site of Haysborough. And these deposits have the potential to answer questions, I think, of global importance. These are the first human adaptations to northern environments. How did humans deal with long cold winters? What sort of technologies did they have? Did they have clothing? Did they have shelter? Did they have fire? Or were they physically adapted? These are questions of global importance and I think we need to recognise that around that coastline we can potentially answer some of those questions. So just to give you that global perspective, there are the earlier sites in northern Europe, unique organic preservation that allows you to reconstruct human habitats in a way that is very rare, insights into earliest human adaptations and these are sites of global interest. And there's plenty more to do. Thank you. OK. Thank you very much, Nick. So, in contrast to what we're seeing on the coast where erosion is doing a pretty efficient job of exposing the deposits of interest, what we're now going to do is to travel further inland to consider the record of the paleolithic resource from fluvial deposits and then to think about that in the context of exposures that have been made, for example, through our long history of aggregate extraction and major construction projects. So our first, our next speaker rather, will be Rob Hosfield from Reading University and Rob will be talking about the records from the English rivers contextualising the results. OK. I don't think, I really need to say, a great deal about perhaps even what the Philippian Archive is, why it's important. It's obviously a very rich mix of sediments, of biological material, of hominin material culture which tell us an awful lot about paleogeography, chronology, habitats and climate, human presence and absence, human behaviour through all phases of the paleolithic. It's perhaps particularly significant for the earlier paleolithic, the lower and the middle, but it is not unsignificant for the upper paleolithic as well. I think the reasons it is such a significant resource is that we can stress, in the majority of cases really, the continuity of these river landscapes. There are one or two notable exceptions, but in the main they provide this sort of long-standing way of focusing on landscape, whether it's in the preanglion or into the later middle plies seen through as illustrated there to the Lake Glacial. And it gives us therefore this very wide spatial temporal resource, and it gives us lots of windows into the paleolithic different places at different times to look at fluvial landscapes and think about their composition and human behaviour associated with them. And thanks of course to the appreciations that in particular developed, or perhaps it's better to say redeveloped in the 1980s and the 1990s, ununderstanding of how river landscapes form and adjust in response both to climate change, but also to uplift. And that was classically demonstrated particularly in the 1990s by David Bridgeland as illustrated here. Which raises the question, is there anything else we need to know about rivers and how they behave to which the polite answer is of course there is, because what we've actually come to see over the last 15 to 20 years is how diverse these river landscapes are in terms of their behaviour and how they respond. So for example you can have variable separation between the terraces in different reaches of rivers contrast here the lower Thames with the vertical separation of the terraces, the old flood plains in the middle Thames. Or we can have examples where the same climatic stages are represented in the same terraces, but we can equally have examples where the same climatic stages are represented in multiple terraces. And there are variations in the numbers of terraces that form in response to climate cycles. Or indeed we can have examples where there's very little preservation of the river record because of local geological conditions and later erosion. Fine, why does any of that matter? Because of course it has huge impacts for understanding artefact contexts, issues of reworking, alleged periods of human presence and absence. And understanding this background is critical to that. As with developing understanding of how varied rivers are and the way they evolve and change in terms of landscapes has been our increasing appreciation of river chronology. And again over perhaps the last decade, two decades we've seen major developments in terms of new methods or more effectively applied methods, optically stimulated luminescence, acid racemisation, a number of key methods are providing us with other ways of establishing the chronology of these deposits, these river landscapes, and their associated archaeology. Again, are there things to do? Absolutely. More work to be done I think in comparisons between different methods, for example between OSL, which over the last few years has had very heavy usage on this side of the channel, with say the ESR, Electronship and Resilence Method, which has had perhaps more application over in France and elsewhere. To what extent can we achieve sub-stage resolution in terms of our dating methods? It's increasingly clear to us how variable past climate was within big interglacials, big glacials. Can we pick up that with dating resolution? Perhaps another key element of this resource is the biological material. Again, many colleagues in this room, enormous strides have been made in terms of understanding biostratigraphy, key biological associations of both macro and micro fauna. Again, I think there are interesting questions moving forward to what extent might we be able to pick up sub-stage resolution in terms of biological material. Quite often when we look at Pleistocene biology, it looks slightly odd. People have written about strange associations, this animal and that animal. Well, in a river context, an interesting question for us to ask is, is that genuine? Or is it a product of rivers washing things together and producing these strange associations, which aren't actually strange at all, they're just a big jumble? Or are they real? Now, in terms of understanding paleolithic ecology, the worlds in which homonins lived, that seems pretty critical. And similarly, of course, many other aspects of the biological record, all those wonderful small critters of various forms that give us remarkable detail about past climates, summer temperature estimates, winter temperature estimates, all these different things. And again, I think there's an interesting question. Can those biological proxies combined with sedimentological data, can they reveal abrupt climate change? Can we pick that up in these records? And how do these different proxies integrate? Their differences in terms of their sensitivity to climate change, lag times in their responses, how do those vary, and what are the implications of those variations for environmental reconstruction? Right, so I've said nothing about archaeology so far. I suppose I've better mentioned it at some point. The obvious point, of course, with the river records, is that just occasionally we get that wonderful high-resolution archaeology, the in situ or the little move, the little disturbed, and that might reveal to us in situ surfaces, stone tool evidence of human behaviour, footprints, as also shown by Nick. Animal remains the associations between stone and bone. And these, of course, are absolutely critical, these moments in time, in terms of particularly when combined with paleo-environmental associations, helping us to understand early human environmental tolerance is some of those themes that Nick was concluding with at the end of his presentation. But, of course, this high-resolution archaeology is pretty thin on the ground, as illustrated. It was a suitable cautionary note about using the pointer. I think the key cautionary note is that I don't turn around and show it to all of you. But, as shown here, the numbers of in-situ sites that we have, very few in far between, are actually quite biased to this south-eastern corner. And so, of course, it's very much the case that it is the low-resolution archaeology, the accumulations of artefacts that have been reworked, washed down river that dominate our archaeological record. But there is much scope to use this archaeology to give us those broader perspectives, whether it's settlement history models that were, in particular, of Nick Asher and Simon Lewis a few years ago now, or thinking about possible patterning in material culture, for example, Mark White's work looking at possible, and that's trends through time in the lower Paleolithic. But again, as with other forms of evidence, there are a number of knowledge issues here. Some of our key collections remain very poorly contextualised. We have the artefacts, we don't necessarily know all that much about the context from which they came. We're sometimes pretty hazy on their age, for example. And there's a key need here for both understanding the history of past research, whether that's gravel quarrying, for example, but also the application of new technologies, deposit modelling, springs to mind, whether done at the site scale or at the landscape or regional scale. And we might also recognise that there are lots of blanks, or less or poorly well-understood areas on our maps. So in this case, these are the various fine spots and sites for the lower and middle Paleolithic. There's somewhere in the region of about 3,500 of them, hence all the overlapping triangles, and there's a few gaps in there, thanks to them. So, things we might want to think about. There are examples where we've come to know particular fluvial river landscapes extremely well. And in many cases, that understanding has come through lots and lots of small interventions, small projects, small bits of work that have accumulated over time to develop this much bigger understanding. And Francis and many others work in North West Kent, springs to mind here. Do we want to keep doing that in the current context? Should we keep doing it if we do? Do we need to advocate very strongly why each of those small individual interventions is important because it contributes to that much bigger picture? Secondly, do we always need to know more? A controversial thought, possibly. So, for example, speaking from my own part of the world, Reading, do we need a few more rolled hand axes from the Boynhill terrace gravels of the Middle Thames? I'm tempted to suggest possibly not. Thirdly, what matters in the Paleolithic river record? I think because, in particular, because we have so many perhaps poorly contextualised collections, old collections, sometimes we need an understanding of sediments, of biology, of dating, much more than we need more artefacts. Fourthly, can we, should we, how do we justify new projects, new interventions in areas that look blank on the map? In short, how do we say to someone, I'd really like money to go and look in this place if no one's found anything before. Can you guarantee finding anything? Well, but actually understanding those blanks better, I would suggest, is really terribly important in terms of a more holistic understanding of Paleolithic landscapes and Paleolithic people. And finally, thinking of a more holistic understanding, I'll throw out the thought, just occasionally, are we a bit too focused on rivers? I will end with the thought that, like Mr Toad, perhaps we might benefit from a short period of leaving the riverbank behind us for a while and exploring more broadly before maybe returning sometime in the future. Thank you. Thanks, Rob. I'm all for having some research questions steered by a variety of small and medium-sized mammals. Right. I think, as Rob has very well illustrated, we are blessed in Britain with a fantastic fluvial record, but maybe there is obviously an opportunity that perhaps we've not capitalised on fully to look at other areas, different types of Pleistocene sedimentary deposition on the landscape, particularly to think about the record from the plateaus and how we might try to pinpoint where sites are likely to be preserved. So our final speaker in this session is Becky Scott from the British Museum, and Becky's title is actually one that is going to take us away. Whoops, we don't want optimal resolution notification. Thank you very much. I think it is optimally resolved now. Becky is going to incorporate a rather wider perspective in this regard. Her title is The Paleolithic Record of the Plateau, A Transmarsh Perspective. Thank you very much, and thank you, Rob, for possibly the greatest setup I could possibly have had because I'm going to move this straight on to the rolling downs and actually talk about capture outside of the river valleys from which we have an exceptional record that our entire discipline, really to date, has been focused upon compiling and interrogating and actually start to think a little bit more about how we can build up more holistic pictures of how humans are using these landscapes. Historically, of course, there's been a lot of work focused, not least of all through the late lamented ALSF projects, upon better understanding, better interrogating the fluvial resource, which is very, very well mapped and well contextualised, and is really the base data upon which the discipline is founded. But there's a problem with always looking in the same places and using the same data. A lot of our questions become self-fulfilling. If you're talking about habitat preference or preferred vegetation and things like that, if you're always looking at fluvial contexts, you're only ever seeing humans occupying river valleys, so you're getting a very, very skewed picture of where people are and how they're moving around. So to look at broader patterns of land use, by relying on our fluvial resource in isolation, we're actually only telling half the story. I think this has a knock-on effect in how this feeds into development control situations in that there's a broad perception that only fluvial deposits have any potential of containing paleolithic material, which is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy if you're only called upon to look at where we already know stuff is, then we're just going to see the same picture amplified, if anything. Another thing about this emphasis on the river valleys is that when we start taking a more joined-up perspective working with our French colleagues on understanding their contiguous landscapes, which were at one point linked across the Southern North Sea and through where is now the Strait of Dover, we have an imbalanced record. As I hope David Harrison is going to flag up earlier, a lot of the sites that are found in development control contexts in Northern France actually come from the plateau and from capture points on the Chalk Plateau. So our picture looks very, very different to theirs because we're not looking in the same sorts of places. I want to flag something up that I'm perhaps referring to as the clay with flints problem. We've known since at least the 1940s and testers work that there's a lot of material coming from the Chalk downland, but this is often described as material from the clay with flints or from deposits mapped as clay with flints. I think this has led to people taking their eye off the ball a little bit in terms of where this material is actually coming from. The geology isn't important. What's important is the processes of how this archaeology is being captured and released within these uplands. Actually, we need to be understanding that the landscape toponomy of the Chalk and how material is being captured on the Chalk in more detail. Not simply being driven by find spots and where people are recovering material but seeking to understand this landscape and its geomorphological evolution in order to understand where people are. Interestingly, one of the things that the clay with flints does do is it keys us into where the Chalk is intact, where you've still got clay with flints capping the Chalk. You haven't got erosion through that cover into the Chalk so you're looking at fairly intact pieces of the upland landscape, but still, how stuff is captured within ephemeral points within that is a totally different question. In terms of capturing something else that we need to understand better is actually patterns of lurse distribution within southern England and especially in Kent in comparison with the excellent record that we've got on the continent. We do have deep sequences of regional lurse as in northern France. They tend to date to the Davenzian. In terms of regional lurse, much, much more shallow than deep position across the continent but it's still there as in this beautiful section from Pegwell Bay in Fannett. Interestingly, these are things that have effects on where you find stuff within France so generally lurse deposition on north facing slopes. Lerse tends to be rare before MIS 6 and is only captured within the same sort of ephemeral points that I'm going to talk about a little bit more here. You're only seeing this older lurse on the continent where we have deep capture. These processes of solution are going on on the Chalk in Britain in exactly the same way so we have the potential for deeper older sequences that not only can be associated with paleolithic archaeology but also perhaps could start to tie our record away from the river valleys into the regional stratigraphy of lurse pedostratigraphy that's been built up over a long time on the continent. Something people come up with a lot when you start talking about these patterns is that this is only a French phenomenon. We haven't got the lurse that we see in northern France. This simply isn't true and sites like Caddington flag this up in particular. So this is a doline or series of dolines of newvular sort of type situation within which Worthington-Smith recovered nests of flake, refitting nests of flake, associated with fine grained deposits described as a brick earth but probably with a significant lursic component. And then turning to the north-downs which is where I grew up and actually what got me interested in the paleolithic in the first place. You've got a lot of fine spots across this area of the downs in comparison with other parts of the north-downs but this is very much driven by local interest so you have a particular local group, dovolararch, logical group who are adept at spotting material on the chalk and logging it. So we've got a very good distribution of material here which when excavated, as in limited work that we did with Mark White at Westcliff and also at Fingolsham, closer to it, tends to be associated with subsurface capture. This isn't one system. There's not one way in which materials are being captured like this. There's all sorts of different ways in which these dull lines, these sinkholes are forming and we need to understand the evolution of this landscape more generally but also within particular sites. I think a focus on a site-driven micro approach to excavation is not the way to go. We're losing the wood from the trees doing that but actually on a broad scale we need to understand these landscape processes and thinking about this on a broad scale, things that are now easily available like Lidar actually show up. A lot of these hollows, a lot of these capture points in ways that weren't always easily possible even just working from air photographs. So things that I think we can start to look at are likely places for capturing these landscapes in terms of where the lurse is coming on, in terms of landscape evolution where you're likely to get captured, where you're likely to have solution hollow formation and then opportunities for release. Some interesting points about this part of the country is actually there's very little opportunity for development or anything to impact upon the top of the Scarp's boat. There's not a lot goes on there apart from farming, farming situations. The roads tend to run along the base of the Scarp so if people aren't actively prospecting up on the downs you're just not seeing that material and this is something that Leslie Blundell who's a PhD student at UCL is working on at the moment. The chalk's not the only upland geology in which there's potential for this sort of material there are other parts of the landscape that we need to understand better one of which is the wild and geologies especially the folkstone beds within which you get these fishes opening up as an item which captured Pleistocene fauna but also with max work at feedings here but also the slope deposits themselves reworked from the folkstone beds are very, very fine an act in particular instances as around Oldbury to capture Paleolithic archaeology and then moving further afield and I think Chantal will talk about this later you know you have situations like Glaston where you have captured up on the upslope within a sort of grab and formed as a result of the evolution of that landscape so just to summarise I think we need to look away from simply focusing on a fine spot driven perspective and to think about opportunities for capture and erosion of landscape on a wider scale to actually create an integrated upland sort of story it's a similar if not the same Cretaceous landscape as Northern France and there's ways in which we can look to Northern France not as an exemplar and not as a model but as a way of starting to think through our records and the sorts of process that are going on and this is something that needs evaluating on a regional scale within different geomorphological regions and something that needs ground-truthing through field work so we understand the rivers very, very well to understand the uplands we need to start working within these landscapes and doing the baseline work in terms of dating ground-truthing and hypothesis testing in terms of how are these forming to really start to understand our record better I'll leave it there OK, thank you very much Becky all our speakers have kept admirably to time which means that we've got plenty of time for the panel discussion now so it would be helpful if Nick, Rob and Becky could come up and then we can get some questions in from the audience initially Oh, it's time for water OK Do we have any questions from the audience first off? Don't be shy My goodness Stun to silence, yes OK, I'll let Rene wander round with the microphone Nick More a comment than anything else Just a brief comment to say that please, please, don't forget the other panel a bit That was going to be a question All the speakers this morning have been concentrated very much of course on magnificent findings of the lower and middle panel a bit but I think also a serious comment is that we've only really just begun to look at the riverbays of the enough in terms of lake-lacial archaeology and therefore to a certain extent we don't want to send out the wrong message that everything is understood about riverbays it may well be in the perspective of teres formation of chronology but I can certainly say in relation to the other panel some of the lake-lacial stuff that's beginning to turn up in riverbays for example the Way Valley the connections it provides between locations in fact it's not just one site I agree with you fully there one that needs to be a whole landscaper site but actually the river valley is very important in providing connections across lake-lacial landscapes where I would agree certainly is the question of looking at the lusit formations and don't forget the cover sands in Lincolnshire and Ferdinand which actually will fill the same sort of thing for us stratigraphically so a lot of material is actually stratified beneath that and it's very, very important and that doesn't need to be made aware of this and of course there's that whole area of brick earths you know around Fatshild, Osbrinch in Kent you know that it's all likely of that date you know there's true lurs within that and impacts upon it at various points for heritif brick extraction at little formations much as everything else Thanks Nick, I think that's a very important point and I don't know if any of our speakers here particularly want to elaborate on the Upper Powell record we're shaking our heads No, okay I mean only just to respond that I think it is a really important point to emphasise that even for those earlier periods we don't fully understand the river records we have a lot from it and there are times and places that we do understand very well but there are an awful lot of times and places I think we understand poorly and so the broader message to take away is that the river record throughout the Paleolithic needs that continued focus absolutely and I think you might argue that obviously the Upper Powell record has been heavily dominated by cave sites as well which is not something that we've even scratched the surface with with some of the earlier Paleolithic material There was another question The mic's coming My question is what sort of documents are you imagining is going to be available for the planning archaeologists to see a summary of your specialist information Are we talking about the region of insert frameworks or much more details in terms of the job space In terms of the chalk downland or more generally Anywhere really I mean I'm a planning archaeologist in Greater London I've got half an hour on every case What can I pick up? I think the things that would be most helpful to planning archaeologists to talk about So where there are shapefiles marking likely extent of Pleistocene sediments perhaps things that flag up to look out for this, this and this being covered within a WSI the sort of questions you'd expect to be addressed within that but how that works most effectively within a given situation of course is something that we need to have a conversation about really But I mean I saw that as the easiest way to deliver that to create those shapefiles for some regions is relatively easily done for others we're pretty much working blind and we don't understand the processes but the actual point of delivery has to be something that's dictated by the planning archaeologists because you know what you need to trigger the right sort of response Does that, yeah? Any more from the floor? Oh Francis Yes hello this is following up what Becky was talking about about Lurs and Kent and that is somewhat on the range already in Kent and that was the start project I did with historic England in Kent County Council where we specifically had the agenda of the targeted investigation of Mack Fricker's process and you know really considering the need for Richard Fricker to what was in Kent it was a very intricate investigation but what we found was there was a lot of defensive deposition and we were trying to find some holds of those to process and I'm sure they are they are not the instance in which we added our member else but the start running report is finished and available online so if anyone wants to look and see our approach and what we actually found and do so is to think about the lack of opportunity because there is no return and when there is some there is a lovely one as a place who unfortunately escapes me where there is a new industrial project being built right on top of one of my crime crime patch and that's what's really important then is that planning our strategists have Mack Lurs or Mack Fricker the Fricker comes in last year and we made it to the Mack Fricker so I don't see everything I'm going to say in my talk but do you not come out because it's the best energy we have into the range of deposits that might contain mycology so what you need is planning our strategists to understand how they can justify investigations of these deposits where there's no known evidence but we are saying there's a percentage of them Matt I guess just follows on to a degree from what Francis was saying which is I think head as Matt has become very much kind of a Cinderella of the archaeological deposits we're very focused on fine grained lurs and we're very focused on fluid deposits but the best opportunity is from really good preservation it's part that's kind of fragmenting up into the upper power and middle power these two things come together in the low parts of the river terraces and we need to be buried under a legion and it's going to contain atroestrial and plebio archives so maybe a question I want to ask you is how regionally without going into the kind of fine minutiae of mapping which becomes kind of unworkable on the HR level can we create and characterize deposit models that are available regionally I don't know the answer to that but it's easier to argue from the detail of what you know up to mapping and in specific regions it's obviously going to take quite detailed knowledge of where particular deposits are outcropping and which may not the BGS mapping is a great first start but it's only a guide topography to that but I think presumably to keep things as simple as possible within particular parts of the landscape we need fairly broad bits zoned out that say to look for those triggers I mean it may be the fact that when you zero in on a particular site within that broad bit of landscape where it's flagged to consider these issues that actually that's inapplicable be that because of previous quarrying, be that because you've actually got to cut out or something like that but at least if these are things that if the geomorphology of a place is thought about at desk base level by somebody who understands those deposits then this is triggered and caught a lot earlier than it might otherwise be I think the approach of you can characterize a regional signature for most parts of the world and one of the things I'm not surprised with maybe I've worked in West Sussex for quite a long time that is how when I think I know what's going on I certainly didn't know the whole I think I should and it can be quite sizable because we've discovered stuff on the coast of Plymouth on the coast of Plymouth that had known him although you do go back and look at the BGS archives then you can actually then go I can now see that in the records so I think it can be a regional approach but always expect unexpected something else to throw at the part talking about the models we've seen the models that Rob will show for these where I think we've got a big gap in our understanding at the moment he's in those very lowest reaches of the River Buddies in the lower 10s downstream of the base model in the lower mainway particularly the area from Chatham down to the coast where I think the accepting models have completely break down and the distribution in place of the models in relation to very gravel models is quite quite different to the way that we see that there's a link between perhaps Andy talking about stuff from there and the coast and the rivers that really do require some quite careful thought and unfortunately most of that's beneath the roadway so it's problematic to access building infrastructure projects like port and how to allow them so forth then it's those areas that will lead to the investigation behind John, here we go I said there wasn't a feel for this especially so please excuse my ignorance Nick about the heat of this stuff I remember that John Ryan-Mongelian said categorically there was no material from those departures and and actually they've been served extensively for a heck of a long time by collectors and then all of a sudden this stuff turns up and I've just wonder talking about mapping and what are they positive for that he is pretty sure but I think it is also we've also recognised that they're actually finding human occupation and science and various parts of the landscape is what I believe in and I know I've looked for that and that's something that I still can't guess for quite a while and I'm only founded by complete accidents in all the transition so I've looked at the finding and then a few flakes turned up so it's the scheme between what the law is doing that we don't take to hell and get that right yeah exactly right and I think it's not just to Hayesbryd I think other areas as you suggest just as an illustration 400 square metres of excavation produce 80 artefacts all of that was served so it's only by looking very very hard that you're finding these sites and I think we have to build that into any future work that we do not just at Hayesbryd but at other sites as well a sort of related thing going to Rob's Rivers I remember I'm sure numerous people here undertaken sitting programmes of large quantities of gravel, certainly France is over there, we've done more than anybody else in the room done my own as well and artefacts are extremely rare there's a site what's the name of the sites on Mary St Chadwell Chadwell St Mary where we set something like 12 tonnes of gravel we knew this is Boynhill sediments I think and I think a single artefact was found as a surface find but nothing within the sift gravel so what's that telling us what are we trying to find what are we looking for and related to what Becky was saying how hard do we have to look to find these upland sites or plateau sites how the distribution of archaeology is going to be critical to our success at finding these things and therefore we have to have strategies that effectively say yes, there are artefacts here or give a more positive stronger negative no, there aren't any artefacts here and I think that's a really important issue to address and eat be so with some of the upper paleolithic sites particularly the early upper paleolithic sites where artefacts are extremely rare so I think that's the issue for all these different areas Mark, at the first Thanks following on what Nick was saying there about the distribution it's not just the distribution of Pleistocene sediments it's the distribution of artefacts within them and understanding the past geography of those systems particularly Fluvial but equally with the doline sequences that Becky was explaining from personal experience with both both the context I mean I was dragged around for much of the 1990s and early 2000s to some godforsaken pits with Dave Bridgeland where we dug sections that you wouldn't really want to do I wouldn't want to do now and it felt absolutely nothing and then when we went back to the archive and had a look at these in the museum collections there were sometimes about hundreds if not thousands of artefacts and when you go and look at the original descriptions for example I was thinking of stirring it Becky you'll remember the details better than I will but it's mentioned something like 16 artefacts per 10 cubic yards which is a lot more the way we're going to be excavating in a few days section cutting and with regards to the doline sites I'll actually DEM which seems to show lots of holes I'd be interested to find out how many of those are bomb craters it's just of the LiDAR and interestingly for Kent in particular they've mapped where the V2s came down and the V1s but there's nothing more general or it's still just on paper records for bomb craters because as our experience and West Coast showed there was a visible solution feature on the surface but that was a red herring and it was a solution front and it was highlighting the fact that it was a solution front there but the actual Pleistocene lower palenithic in this case doline was tens if not hundreds of metres away so you're looking for a solution front and then you've got to do I think what Matt and Becky have done in Jersey which is actually starting but this is our starting point and where's it come from and Matt's landscape approach I think is a starting point to that Can you say anything about that? No Just in terms of the doelines and where they tend to appear in the landscape there are commonalities and places where they tend to form so those usually the big collections of doelines tend to crop out on the edge of a chalk valley above the water table basically so modelling that yeah, room for the people yeah, you can model broadly those places in the landscape as a sort of place where you're likely to have captured potential so it's those sort of drawing together understanding the landscape better and drawing together that broad confluence of circumstances and just flagging up that that's somewhere to check for capture The biggest problem with all of these sites though is the fact that they really have organic preservation so we're stuck in a situation where we've got all of these very interesting sites on the top of the hill floating in a half million years of ether Unless you've got an equivalent of unless you can start tying it into the regional lurse stratigraphy in which case then you do start to have very detailed control on where in bloatial integration cycles you're dealing with There was a question at the back and then Francis again so, yep I think just in terms of we're looking at sort of trying to find a practical solution of going from everything that people are saying in terms of how that then feeds into perhaps the planning process and how that backs up I think a greater use of GIS in terms of taking it from the landscape down to the site detail would be really good so we can plug it and set parameters for different regions for based on geology, elevation whatever kind of thing that you can imagine that you might like to flag and set those parameters and anyone in the regional sort of county office or city officer and then just plug all those parameters into GIS and run those run those things to help model exactly where we might look for things so perhaps what we need then is sort of just more of that discussion between asking to use GIS and all that and modding regularly in hours of day to day search life and then linking in the HER record and a bit more of a practical level Do you think that might be a possible aid in this or is it already happening sort of a bit more of an proactive role Robin or Becky I mean, I'll be up again but I was going to say obviously that's something that would be great but actually I think you probably need something much much simpler at the interface you know you don't want to be having to train people in the HERs who are totally overstretched at the moment how to run complicated queries into which sort of you just want to flag up you know particular spots and particular it's just putting simple shape files on derived from understanding of landscape that just flag those factors to be considered I think My main concern there just is what you're outlining is just the staggering quantity of work that that involves I think it's a great idea and it came to mind because of the recent completion of the projects up in Worcester where they've done a lot of this GIS enhancement now that is a relatively small body of data that they've been dealing with but I know they've commented at just the level of work that that has involved and so that and my concern I suppose with these kinds of IT driven solutions is how quickly the IT shifts and that we can start projects and before we finish those projects potentially it's moved on in a way that what we produce may not always be that useful anymore even though when we set out it was very useful and that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it but I think we do need to think really carefully about how those sorts of IT projects are going to work the scale at which they can work I mean I think you're absolutely right I think some of that automated querying ability is hugely valuable I think maybe the big challenge in is the big headache but and also what systems of people already working with them how does that sort of work with exegesis or something like that whatever you're running that conversation has to be had with planning archaeologists about what we can deliver to them not us coming up with an all singing all dancing research solution that is never going to work in practice I think If I'm allowed to hold the mic for a moment I mean it was clear from a number of the comments that have been made that we've all had experience of examples on allegedly not allegedly that's not fair rich sites but where actually the volumetric density of artefacts in these rich sites is perhaps much less than we might think and it does I think highlight the need for us to reflect on what do we mean by success and failure that I think in some investigations not finding artefacts it's not failure because the paleoethic record is this much broader body of evidence its sediments, its biology and that there are lots of circumstances in which particularly some of these older deposits that have yielded a lot of material in the past if we can go back do targeted work contextualise those old collections that is critical and whether one finds another couple of hand axes along the way or another couple of just to be inclusive upper paleolithic blady things sorry then ok it's that other evidence which I think sometimes is critical there are contexts in which that's what is important and that that can be a measure of success Nick do you want to come in on that because I think there's some interesting comments to be made possibly with the records that you've been working on as well in terms of looking for things how hard you have to work to get that it's really what I was saying before I think that we have to have Rob's absolutely right what is success, what is failure we have to have systems that properly answer that question and there is no such thing as failure nearly always with finding other evidence that is contributing to the much larger picture the environmental evidence understanding of sediments and so on but from the planning point of view if there's a watching brief investigation you need to be absolutely sure that we've got the systems in place that really answering the question are there artifacts here or are we simply not looking hard enough and I think we really need to take this on board when we're looking at the planning process Francis then Matt Can I ask a mind back to what Nick has said by the microscope of Charles can I also say point again I think there's a couple of points to raise firstly there's a general structural difficulty for Califarchologists and how he didn't think in dealing with stuff that is very rare that's important when you find it and I haven't really been very constructive on this but in terms of stuff and progress I was organizing a similar problem about 15 years ago and I cut up there about the seminal site of Dunbridge which is the estimated the whole very very rich historical site loads of test pits and nothing in them so I think this actually needs and maybe we need to rethink how we think of grapples is not just a modernist mass of disturbed stuff it's a deposit that might contain isolated concentrations and need to think of them as sites so we need to think that graduating of brutal rapids as a landscape where there may be big areas and not very much the concentrations of some things in some places and that's the way into considering how we approach it and just to find before the update is a point that you absolutely may look at Charles don't know to go over the line this is something I've suggested specifically I've heard quite a lot of work on the end maps which I know is not planning on finding areas of character and potential and the supplementary expert business you pour over the geology you look at the topography you guess where geological deposits will continue you look at the historical round world quest as you plan and you come up with your expert assessment of areas of higher potential was I prepared this to try and develop a more algorithmic approach to assess the expert analysis and see how the results compare and can build towards a more effective algorithmic approach and that's something certainly I like to be able to do I think a lot of these points are highlighting especially in the planning process is just how much inherent risk there is in just dealing with the AGR as a distribution of finding spots even with the qualification of putting in deposit models you know a good kind of upper paleolithic and Odyssey examples Oxford's work carried out in East Sussex by Mike, by Donnelly where you know we got big gaps on that that produced entire late glacial and early Odyssey landscapes with multiple sites as Martin said you know even when you've got expertise even when you know a landscape the chances of surprises coming up is huge if we scale that up nationally with the big differences in the AGR those areas that haven't had AGR reviews and we put that against maybe you know half an hour or an hour or even a couple of hours in putting together a WSI or a desktop assessment there's a lot of risk there we could test algorithmic models and see if they work with expertise but until we've got that in place we've got expertise into the planning process right at the beginning in a way that isn't onerous on clients and isn't onerous in time on half press AGRs and I'm just wondering whether we need to have better networks of the expertise that sits across commercial research archaeology to get that expertise in at an early stage so we're not relying on dots on maps clients thank you I think to come back to some fundamental issues here which paleotic archaeologists and those concerned with the planning process will always wrestle I mean just to come back to the theme of this particular discussion about how well do we understand the record let's just broaden it out a little bit for a moment I think as all three speakers showed we have actually let's just give ourselves a pat on the back for a moment we've actually made some huge leaps forward when John Weimer was doing southern rivers and then English rivers it really was kind of pinning the temple on the donkey and putting fine spots onto those BGS maps and so on and it was sort of an early bridge road in those days for the terrace sequences we didn't know anything about the north of the coasts and nobody was really looking at the plateau areas we've come a huge way forward in that and the archaeological science that now underpins all that particularly in terms of dating and the biostratigraphy environments it's just huge and so we have moved forward if you take it back 30 years before John started that work I mean it really was the dark ages and we didn't even have an idea about really what we were looking at so we've come a long way but what we've now got to the point of though is realising that there's still much that we don't understand and part of that is because they're just the sheer difficulties of obtaining representative samples from these various deposit blocks which all three speakers talked about and I'm sure we'll come back to that in the later sessions and broaden that discussion that way but what I'd just quite like to do Nick had one final bullet point which he didn't talk about which was new worlds waiting to be discovered and I think it's important to just remind ourselves just how fantastic this archaeological record is and why it has been taken seriously by English heritage and Historic England and by the planning process generally and where it's been successful it has paid enormously I mean Nick for example has managed to double the length of the archaeological record in this country which is no mean feat really it may only involve 80 artefacts but you know they are 80 very important artefacts so I'd just like to tease out from Nick and the other speakers what these new worlds waiting to be discovered might be and how that is actually going to contribute to the kind of intellectual excitement of British archaeology Yeah I think it's not just British archaeology I think we can go further than that I mean the whole of the Croma forest bed it's an amazingly rich series of sediments that covers one and a half million years possibly even longer and we do have easy exposure to these sediments on a go down to a beach anywhere along that coast and you'll encounter somewhere the forest bed and in the past there was a claim 20 years ago or whatever it was that there is no archaeology in these sediments and people had been looking for 200 years so we have to find better ways of studying those series of sediments we have to also understand how the chronology works within those sediments and therefore the more likely places to look and Simon Parford and Richard Priest have been doing fantastic work front so that's one way forward that we really have to understand how those sediments work together that will give us some sort of insight into where to look and find ways of we've had a certain amount of success at Haysbury it's been very costly, it's been very hard work it's not easy work either so do we want to invest heavily in that type of work that we want to ensure you've also got the offshore record of course and we're getting better and better at looking at that record but again it's not easy the potential for those sediments is immense, it's not just putting the human record further back in time but it's providing an environmental context for human presence these have got to be some of the most important questions globally where are the frontiers of human presence has that changed through time northern Europe we have the benefit probably the earliest humans in northern environments anywhere around the globe so understanding that frontier we have the tools to understand that frontier so I think that's got to be a question and how that relates to human adaptation either physical adaptation or the development of new technologies to cope with long winters in case of Hayesborough similar to northern Germany or southern Sweden how on earth were they doing it we had a meeting the other day with Rob Hossfield a new initiative and this is certainly for me one of the main interesting questions for the next decade does that answer your question? I think it would be handy also if Rob and Becky are happy to answer that in terms of where the next big step change will come what do you dream of from your individual records whether it's rivers or plateaus I don't know I guess I dream of northern France but it would be we know that we have similar sorts of capture points we know that we have similar quantities of artefacts coming from these sorts of upland locale we know that in individual cases so thinking of Caddington and the Chiltern sites in particular we know we have extensive refitting where I'd like to go with this is start to put together the fluvial record looking from the site level in detail in terms of what you can see people doing at particular places in the landscape to the upland and start to build up patterns of land use throughout the landscape not in one particular place but this not to be simply focused on North East Kent or the Chilterns or Alton in Hampshire or anything like that but for this to be part of a joined up thinking about the records of North West Europe and particularly across the channel these contiguous landscapes that currently we don't have a harmonised record but there are ways of bringing this together and I think there are disharmonies in the record as well that look like difference that actually doing this sort of base level work will help us address so in Northern France you have a lot of sites that date to stage 6 we have no human occupation bar a couple of bits going into stage 6 is that a real pattern is that just that we are not looking in the right sort of place or does this tell us something about human adaptation changing adaptation and where people can actually occupy in the landscape and how does that change over time and I think these are the things that excite me really Tom I should start by saying that the project that Nick referred to is myself and James Cole and I stress that as you hear in the audience in particular I think I think what I would like to see is in terms of moving forward is actually a more in terms of the rivers particularly a more nuanced appreciation of what these riverine landscapes were like I think because they've produced certainly particularly for earlier periods so much for archaeology I'm not sure at times we fully acknowledge perhaps what living in them was like the whole sort of life on the ground idea as one or two a colleagues who are here will know I spent bits of the early 2000s blundering around a Welsh river flood plain just outside Aberystwyth thinking about artifact dispersal patterns and loaded down as admittedly as I was with and all the rest the number of times I fell over and fell in unexpected holes in the flood plain and I remember myself and my companion at the time Jenny Chambers who was doing the work with me we just looked at each other and said thank goodness there's not a spotted hyena or something out here because we'd have long since been eaten and I think at times we're not we're not terribly good we reconstruct these beautiful beautiful pleistocene habitats and environments I think we could do a little bit more to think about what does it actually mean to live in them what are they really like and I still think there's a little bit of a tendency for us to sort of look down on them from above and say well there was woodland here and there was grassland here and these are the sorts of animals okay stop looking at it from above in a sort of rather godlike way stick yourself down there and I think on that sort of broader theme perhaps of the ecology of living and of survival I do think that a really exciting area of development is in the late Upper Paleolithic the late Glacial where we've got this wonderful wonderfully detailed evidence for climatic change for climatic variability and I think it's a fantastic test case for appreciating how in this case homo sapiens as a hunter-gatherer responds to those dynamic significant changes I remember sitting in classes listening to Clive and he would show me a climate curve and it was big it was like a sort of big dipper when it was cold here and it was warm there and then it was cold again and he thought okay very good very good now every time I look at those climate curves and there they are oscillating up and down these dramatic relatively short term changes what does that mean if you're living what does that mean for paleolithic humans do they do they kind of go I'm going to tough it out and then when it gets really unpleasant they fall over do they subtly respond to changes in ways that half of us because we all spend most of our time in offices have forgotten about and they respond to these subtle environmental cues and they move somewhere else and they're different I think these are really big exciting questions and it's the same thing in a different way that Nick was picking up on how do humans in the past cope with climate change and I think all of our records increasingly give us a way to think about those experiences final from what Rob was saying there Paul and I discussed in the British paradigm and it was something that came also out of the Jersey conference several things that are being mentioned today the first is Becky's point or was it Rob's I can't remember that most of the places we dig are all the same place this is kind of the normal environment that we're talking about there which is probably why we rarely find anything like a base camp should they exist or not let's not go there the other point I think I need to make is the fact that I've noticed a particular scalar problem between humans and their environments and that is that the resolution of our environmental reconstructions of course goes from Malankovic scales right down to pods was the Beatles where Russell used to be able to tell you what was going on on the Tuesday afternoon and we've got those scales of resolution and there's a continuum in between but we have a problem with humans and Rob, I'm sorry to disagree with you but I think that when we're dealing with climate change and with environmental change we perceive a human that lives for 50,000 years and they don't, they live for 25 and then they die and I don't think that any one human say perhaps in the most extreme downshodd ocean events experience climate change in a lived sense but in those dramatic shifts it's an interesting possibility and I'm always struck that with some of that really high resolution climate change we're occasionally told it's shifting by 10 degrees now year on year at the moment we're told oh it's it's half a degree warmer this year I think we notice I'm not going to worry you don't mate that's a fair con you mean it's that shift from cold to even colder okay, John just a couple of comments when I was on GIS I used to be a different HR from Pilar SMR and my experience is that in GRs in those days you still contain a lot of data but not much information now at GIS we do now actually have the opportunity to data into information but what's even more important is actually to have a human process to turn information into knowledge and suddenly what we're talking about is actually how you capture and develop and interrogate and further knowledge and that knowledge has to be pitched at the level of the general public because it's you know Pilar, if you want to get support for the things you've been doing you actually have to use the public because it's the public paper of one way or the other either through development and the sort of questions we can talk around now whether they are tools, have they survived a lot of talk about yeah what sort of arounds are these people in you've got reality shows people trapped on an island trying to survive if they're found hard what would it have been like 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 years ago these are questions actually that the public actually really in John really run they'll ask you how did they get to their partners you know but what are they doing with these bits around those are sorts of things that actually we don't I think don't forget Wise words, does anyone want to respond on that not signing up for a game show any time soon OK yes, right at the back are we becoming anti-finespot on maps though the date is the data so findspots are what we have it's what those findspots mean and not giving those findspots equal weight so when you're simply plotting stuff along rivers in one area as we pretty much end up doing in a lot of Britain versus when you look at the distribution of French sites for instance those tend not to be findspots but to be sites excavated and dated sites you very rarely see a map of all the paleolithic findspots in northern France there's a disjunct between what we're actually seeing which I think makes it difficult to put them together at the moment because we're actually not talking about the same sort of distribution and I think that's something that we need to work together more to actually harmonise what we're seeing Just like to ask Becky a question which I've read down ages ago you've got your plateau sites, your upland sites where first of all are the daylines just capture points or are they actually attracted to people and therefore get archaeology alongside them if not and you've got a sort of general spread of archaeology of archaeological sites here then everywhere what's happening to it where's it going, where's it ending up which relates to dots on maps because there is a way into this in terms of field walking programmes different ways of assessing Yeah and is something that is regionally very very different so somewhere like East Kemp where you've got a very very active local group who are keyed into looking for the Paleolithic record of the down so you actually get quite good mapping of where stuff is and isn't occurring as long as Jeff Halliwell can drive there in his car and it's not too far from his house sort of thing in over in Surrey you get a similar sort of you know very good individual snapshot of the spread of material across the landscape in terms of whether these locations are acting as a magnet and not simply as a capture point of material that would be just blanket spread across the landscape we've done very very little work on the record of this country to actually really answer that question and to know what people are doing there but when you look at the continental record people are extracting raw material people are you get intact napping scatters within doline sometimes stretched as the doline has continued to subside you know you've got very very detailed information and suggestions that these are acting as magnetic locations that they're located at particular points in the landscape often on plateau edges that give you good views out into the landscape as well as raw material being available so it's sort of a bit of both but we can't just import a pattern that we're seeing elsewhere onto a record that currently you know we just know where there are fine spots and we don't actually know a lot about the capture the date the environment or any of those things all of which are questions that we could address okay right okay well I had several questions that I was going to ask our speakers in case you all turned out to be mute but actually you've been fantastic with coming forward with questions and stimulating debate so thank you to you we're going to now for a short break so there will be coffee served in the wheeler room where we started and oh we'll reconvene afterwards but please join me in thanking our speakers for the first session this time