Early Upper Palaeolithic archaeology at Beedings, West Sussex: new contexts for Pleistocene archaeology

Abstract

The site of Beedings in Sussex was first recognized as the source of some exceptional Upper Palaeolithic flintwork in 1900, but subsequently disappeared from the archaeological literature. In the 1980s it was recognized again, but it was not until 2007–8 that in situ Palaeolithic archaeology was found at the site. In this article, the director of the excavations describes the discovery, within a network of geological fissures, of two separate industries, one Middle Palaeolithic and the other Early Upper Palaeolithic. The archaeology at Beedings spans a crucial cultural transition in the European Palaeolithic and therefore provides an important new dataset for the analysis of late Neanderthal groups in northern Europe and their replacement by modern human populations.