 Well I'm not going to give a plenary address. I couldn't. I think actually that nearly all the most of the papers we've heard, and particularly the last two, have actually provided a plenary address. So I just want to make a couple of remarks. I haven't got any PowerPoints. Then I think we might just have a few final questions before toasting Ieithiwn i'r newid ddweud ymlaen o'r gwahs. Felly, when Matt and I came up with the idea of this meeting, we felt that the Paleolithic community hadn't really come together to talk about these sorts of issues and to go beyond the immediate Paleolithic community to involve curators, sy'n bwysig i gychwyn fod yn llawer y proces y lawer o aethau waspwys, cyfnodio ar wrthuig ac mewn. Ar eistedd hynny wedyn ydych yn ddweud thaton o gynnydd. Mae gwaith yn y cyfnodio palmiso'r hynny, ond mae'n golygu i ddim yn cael ei dweud yn cael ei ddim yn ddweud. Daewch yn wych chiHHH. Yn y gallai iawn o'i cyfnod yw am Haflwyr. Mae'r rhagliannol oedd gofal yng nghymru i thymau ydych chi'n gweld y normau, fel that we felt that there needed to be a kind of wider overview. So we started off with those two questions which we thought that the Paleolithic needed to investigate which was how can we protect what we do not understand. This is very, I think we were in a kind of Donald Rumsfeld moment here about the knowns and the unknowns and the knowns that are not known and so on. But how can we protect what we do not understand? And we've heard a lot about that today. And I think the overriding view there is that we can answer that question through further research and also a very frank understanding of what we don't know. And our second was how can we understand that unknown in greater detail. And we've talked a lot about methodologies and David's examples from France. I think we're extremely important in showing us that we're not alone in this and that there are other ways, albeit perhaps slightly different geologies and of course different traditions of research into these periods which allow us to do that. So that I think in asking the Antica is to host this organisation, host this particular event, that was our hope that we would actually provide a forum again for bringing the Paleolithic together and for pushing some of these ideas forward or at least testing the temperature of those particular waters. And this was something that I don't think we ever really did in those research frameworks documents. And I was involved in several of them. And we did have very large meetings I seem to remember, but not as big as this. And we aim to be inclusive. And hence, there are 101 particular topics that people would like to have seen impacted. And there I would agree with the new approach that Mark put forward there with the E-Cubed, that I think we do need to simplify that process and to come back to some sorts of basics and forget about those eternal issues of diet and mobility and evolution and so on, which will always be there. I did go back like Jonathan and looked at my much-thumbed copy of the 1948 Survey and Policy of Field Research. It's a wonderful document actually. The Paleolithic part was written by K.P. Oakley, so it was written from great authority. It's interesting looking at the whole document because very wisely it goes up to the Anglo-Saxon period and then stops. So it just shows you how inclusive archaeology was in 1940. It also took about five years to come out, but I put that down to paper shortages after the war. We were all on rations then, but it's interesting looking at it, though, from the point of view of the Paleolithic through. Everyone seems to be asking the same questions. They all want to know what the age of various things are, but they've written this document without knowing that radiocarbon is just round the corner and is actually going to change their lives. Now, it took a long time to change the Paleolithic's life. It helped in the Mesolithic and it obviously helped in the Upper Paleolithic, although we now know that all those early dates have to be thrown away. They're complete rubbish, but it didn't help what we heard about this morning for the later Middle Pleistocene and so on, which has risen to prominence. It seems to me that it was after that moment that there was this kind of fault line appeared in archaeology generally and certainly in British archaeology between those periods that could exploit radiocarbon and be freed from the shackles of having to work out chronologies based on some inscription in Egypt and how you translated it across 3,000 miles into a stonehenge or something like that. The sorts of things that Gordon Child was absolutely brilliant at doing and suddenly archaeologists were relieved of that very intricate kind of scholarship and they could start asking different questions. It took the Paleolithic a lot longer to catch up, but catch up we did and I suppose one thing that has concerned me listening to the papers today is that there's kind of just a little sense that we've lived through a golden age and that we're seeing this golden age of aggregates Levy and Ahob and many of these wonderful projects like Channel Tunnel and the sites that went along with it. We're seeing that kind of slightly slip off into the past and I don't think that's the case. Golden ages are always a little bit of a myth, but I don't feel that we should feel embarrassed by our previous success. What we should do is build on that success and to take it forward. I'm also a little concerned about the bunker mentality and I noticed on Mark's first slide that along with the venerable institutions of Oxford, Cambridge, Southampton, Royal Holloway, Durham, wherever, he also had Hogwarts. It was up there in the middle of the slide and maybe those at the back couldn't see it that well but I could see it and of course the thing about Hogwarts is there are four houses and obviously the Paleolithic community would put itself in Gryffindor because Gryffindor is always going to win and if we were nasty I suppose the Romanists would be in Slytherin or something like that but my point is that we want to get rid of this kind of silo bunker mentality. We're all interested in the past and in human history so if I was being really controversial and I have written about this I would say that actually what we need to do is to get rid of some of this 19th century baggage that was invented by Lubbock and all these other great people and that can certainly be looked at in terms of the history of the subject and terribly important it is but in a sense we're all studying deep history. We may study very deep history and the Neolithic people may study more recent deep history but it's a seamless continuity of trying to tell the human story through objects, through landscapes, through the environments that we can reconstruct guided by some big principles such as evolutionary theory in our case but many other theoretical perspectives can be brought in and for me I think that we're a lot stronger if we're actively taking down those barriers and talking to our colleagues as many speakers have intimated and particularly John was arguing that we should all go off and dig on a Roman site or a Neolithic longbarrow just to get the feel of what's going on in those particular periods and I think that that's absolutely right and that of course is the genius of the of our hosts today the Society of Antichories that not only embrace all of deep history they embrace all of shallow history as well and there are heralds and all sorts of people interested in antiquarianism as well so that was that was one thought I don't think we're at the end of a golden age we're we're we're still riding that particular crest so I just had a few other thoughts though which because we've got a couple of minutes before so I'd be interested to hear what people might think and I'm going to call I'm going to give him advanced warning but I'm going to call on my co-organiser to also say a couple of words if he would like to towards the end but what do I take what do I take away from today well some of the phrases I've written down as we've been going along I think the key one is expect the unexpected and but that's a that's a phrase which I think all archaeologists would subscribe to you dig your own age pitch you've got no idea what's at the bottom of it you pray for a gold talk you end up you know with a cereal grain but that's that's that's the way that archaeology works our unexpected is partly because we still don't quite understand the dimensions of the paleolithic record because it is complex and it is difficult to sample and we're not yet sure that we've got a representative sample of what was there representative sample by landscape by environmental type by hominin whatever it might be and that I think goes along with what Nick was talking about you know that we've got these new worlds waiting to be discovered and that I think is still the great intellectual excitement about the paleolithic about the deepest of deep history that those worlds they had to be imagined 150 years ago and we're still imagining them and and then testing that imagination against hard evidence and data to see what is what is going on then we had a phrase from Francis which I think followed on from that the paleolithic is the same but different but yes that's true of all of archaeology every period is the same but different it has its own particular traditions and its own ways of working my argument would be along that Hogwarts line that we need to we need to work out the ways in which the paleolithic fit in to the rest of human history it may require rather different and specialist archaeological methods but its position in human history has to be guaranteed and has to be put in there so what else a meeting like this we can all go away with a good feeling and so on we can all get our copy of lost landscapes and have a glass of wine but I think we need to move a little bit further on and try and think about where we would want to take this and how we would want to use the energy generated in such a meeting to best effect and these were just my thoughts going along and I think they chime with the historic England's agendas under the aims and the strategic policies of heritage 2020 and I noticed on Jonathan's slides that they were fitting there but I think we seem all agreed and this is where I'd like a little bit of feedback that enhancing the H.E.R devising a mechanism by which this citizen science by which our own academic research our own archaeological contract grade literature all the work that's going on that is finding materials actually gets into a central resource which can then help us understand about this deep past and which can help us inform the processes of planning and curating on a much more solid footing and that I think is important and I think one of the ways that that needs to be run alongside is something else that's kept coming back and back today which is modelling the deposits in which we find this is a really powerful tool. James raised the issue of GIS and maybe we're not quite ready for the national GIS although it would be great if we could have it but this deposit modelling and talking to some of you in the coffee breaks more along the lines of identifying you know the 50 wetland sites that are at most risk we identify the 50 deep history deposits which are at most risk or at most potential and then we can look at those so that was one thought and how to do that I suppose the scheme which has impressed me most is the portable antiquity scheme and flows were mentioned at one point I think there's a model or not just a model of framework which I think we could align ourselves with much more closely which gives us both public engagement and this of course is why government is so keen to fund PAS although maybe not quite at the levels that it deserves but they are very keen with it and Edvezy the minister is always talking about PAS as being a shining example because it reaches parts of the stakeholder community that other parts of the heritage don't and it seems to me that we have an even more ubiquitous set of materials in lithics and whatever to engage but I would like to hear more about that as a possibility I think revisiting John Wymer's great guidance notes is well overdue and if Mark will allow me that it's not a part of a research agenda but I think that that sort of guidance does need to be redrafted and a group such as this I think is from this group it would be good to have that sort of support that that's what needs to be done and to find how it might then be disseminated and the revision would be to go through through that so those were all the thoughts that I had but I just wondered if Matt would like to take this opportunity to say a few words or whether he feels that that's unnecessary I always like putting co-organisers on the spot thank you Clive I've not prepared a thing I'm going to open my mouth and we'll see we'll see what comes out it's been of course a great pleasure to bring this meeting here to the Society of Antiquaries and I think one of the exciting things about bringing it here is these are really really challenging times for heritage protection and for archaeology in Britain it looks as if they're going to get a hell of a lot more challenging as well nothing that we'd seen within the past couple of years can give us any sort of sucker or comfort that things are going to get great everything I remember being a teenager finding my first bag of flints in the field taking along to Andrew Woodcock I don't know if Andrew's still in the room um East Sussex County archaeologist and Andrew Dutifly putting it into the HER going to the museum seeing material that my great grandfather collected these are all knowns and constants that we grew up with and if we're not careful we're going to live to see all of these fixed points in the heritage landscape come under huge stress and maybe even disappear now the paleolithic is our tiny corner and we're here fighting the paleolithic but I think we're only going to be strong if we join up the connections between all of these different periods into the wider narrative for various reasons it's not going to be at the individual university departments or the period interest groups it's going to be those groups like the society of antiquaries like the cba which have enough disconnection from the agendas from the politics from the creation or the implementation of policy to truly have a radical voice and say no enough you know this this isn't going to work because no one else is actually speaking out no one else has enough distance from self-interest to actually be able to make those calls for our own part in paleolithic archaeology one of our great strengths has been that as our discipline has transformed itself over the past say generation 30 years 40 years it's allied itself so much more closely with paternary science we've benefited so hugely by working with geographers retigraphers dating specialist scientists and we've managed to embed a part of archaeological practice very successfully within a scientific paradigm and this is all to the good and I'm not suggesting we change direction on that tool but I do think as someone who identifies self-identifies as a paleolithic archaeologist we also need to reconnect nationally and maybe on a european level as prehistorians as archaeologists try and see that connectivity that actually reconnects the paleolithic not just with the mesolithic and god knows we have enough trouble there but yes with the neolithic with the bronze age with the iron age and beyond and actually find those commonalities not just in themes not just in research questions but in the fundamental texture of the landscape how does the deep distribution of Pleistocene sedimentation translate right the way through into land use into medieval period you can draw those lines you know lurse deposits through the LBK to good preservation of medieval field systems all of those lines are there and we've got to be part of joining it up because it's only going to be by joined up we're actually going to achieve this um I've learned a lot through our response in 2008 with um you know the the crash of the economy seeing the writing on the wall with the research wondering how we're going to pursue our own research agenda in developing a program research in jersey which was very much a response to that and working together as a group with some other fantastic prehistorians of quaternary specialists and thinking about how we can impact not just on research in a particular block of land that happened to be 10 by 5 miles in size but also feeding into community archaeology into evolving policy and protection an ongoing an ongoing process these kind of lessons have got to be played out now I think on a county by county authority by authority basis and it's only going to be by working together by being more connected by joining up those lines that um we're going to be more effective so yeah this is paleolithic 2020 but you know this is prehistory and this is archaeology and we've got to be part of that bigger community too so thank you thank you matt and rather like just a minute we've now filled up the time uh so we're we're we are right at the at the wine reception moment um and uh I think uh it just remains for me to thank our hosts today in particular uh well a general thank you to the society of Antiochurys and to its council who approved this uh meeting and have funded it but also in particular to John Lewis who gave us full support when we came to him with this idea uh and to René Ladoo who's been uh indefatigable in organising it keeping us to time making sure we're fed uh and coughed and so on so thank you ex very much indeed for that and I'd just like to thank all our speakers who came today and uh and gave us such great papers and who were kept to time so admirably that in my experience is something that could well be passed on to other periods in archaeology so thank you very much for that but more importantly to all of you who've come and from your very diverse backgrounds have shown that the Paleolithic is a very broad tent and that we are open to all so thank you very much indeed and outside of the wine reception