I must first of all thank you, and more especially Professor Childe and Mr. Maynard, as colleagues and fellow-workers in the research of Prehistoric Man, for the special honour you have paid to my labours, by appointing me your President for this year. I owe, I think, this exceptional mark of esteem to the many personal friends I have amongst you and to the fact that you are particularly alive to the attention with which I have tried to follow the valiant efforts of many of you, and to absorb on the actual sites the unusually important stratigraphical facts which these efforts have helped to bring to light.

It was in 1898 that I came for the first time to your island, to study the Bronze Age of France at Nashmills, the home of your great fore runner, John Evans, one of the three English savants who gave their allegiance to Boucher de Perthes.

I came back again in 1904 to study the Bruniquel collection at the British Museum, where Charles Reid and Reginald Smith gave me a generous welcome. Haddon and Henry Balfour, by their small but very instructive books on the evolution of primitive art, opened for me hitherto unsuspected vistas on the ornamental art of the Reindeer Age. It is to them that I owe my introduction in 1912, to Miles Burkitt, whom I took with me when he was quite young on my Spanish explorations and excavations, and who is now one of your masters.

I desire first of all to express my appreciation of the honour you have done me in electing me President of the Society. Faced with the necessity of choosing a subject suitable for a Presidential Address, it occurred to me that a brief survey of the distribution of Man in East Anglia during the Neolithic, Bronze and Early Iron Ages might be appropriate. Selection of the region wherein the Society was born, and which inspired the fruitful work of its founders and their successors, is intended as a tribute of gratitude from one who has profited by the study of the many important Papers published in its Proceedings.

The general principles, recognized as governing Man's distribution under uncivilized or semi-civilized conditions in Britain, may first be summarized.

In the Lowland area to which East Anglia belongs soil is the chief determinant. There are two main types of soil: pervious, such as that overlying chalk, sand, gravel; impervious, as that overlying clay. The pervious soils induce an open type of country, or carry forest with relatively thin undergrowth; the rapidity with which such soils dry up after rain, the ease with which a scratch agriculture can be practised on them, their suitability for pastoral life, the ease of movement on them—all these factors render them attractive to early Man. As a group they form the Area of Primary Settlement. The impervious clay soils, on the other hand, carry forest with dense undergrowth, are difficult to clear, and when cleared difficult to cultivate with primitive tools. To the physical unsuitability of such soils for settlement there is added a second deterrent; water-laden soils under the conditions of savage life produce disease in man and beast. But when cultivation of such soils is possible they are found to yield the heaviest crops to tillage, being especially good for corn-growing. They are, then, utilized when civilization reaches a certain level, and have accordingly been grouped as the Area of Secondary Settlement.

It is now close upon twenty-five years since the first flints from beneath the Red Crag of Suffolk—and claimed to have been flaked by man—were placed before the scientific world. During the period of time which has elapsed since 1907, a great deal of careful excavation, carried out by means of generous financial support given by the Royal Society, the Percy Sladen Fund, the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, the Field Museum of Chicago and other Institutions, has been undertaken, and in consequence, a very considerable body of knowledge regarding the archaeological, and other contents of the Suffolk Bone Bed, has been accumulated.

I propose, therefore, to take as the subject of my Presidential Address, “The Culture of Pliocene Man;” to place before you the evidence which makes it possible to use such a title in describing the sub-Red Crag artefacts, and to draw your attention to certain remarkable facts and conclusions relating to these specimens which must now be faced and considered. But it is necessary, first of all, to give a brief account of the Red Crag and the Suffolk Bone Bed (sometimes also called the Detritus Bed or the Nodule Bed) which underlies it, and in which the relics of man have been found.

It has long been recognised that the post-glacial (25-ft.) raised-beach of north-east Ireland contains, in addition to flint implements of Early Neolithic age and aspect, artefacts of Lower Palaeolithic forms. The presence of these early types within this beach may be accounted for as:—

1. A recrudescence of earlier forms during Early Neolithic times;

2. Lower Palaeolithic artefacts which have been derived from the glacial and inter-glacial drifts of the locality:

3. A mixture embraced by categories 1 and 2.

The evidence for the determination of this question must be sought outside the beach itself owing to the masking of the surface variations of the specimens through the deposition of a creamy-white patination and through marine attrition, though, regarding the latter, it should be mentioned that glacial striae have been observed upon certain of the implements recovered from the post-glacial (25-ft.) raised-beach at Kilroot.

Though the terrace gravels and palaeoliths of north-west Kent are well-known, there is little published on the stratigraphy of implements elsewhere in the county, except the Sturry deposits, two miles north-east of Canterbury (Archaeologia, LXXIV, 117). The geological Drift map is old (the latest edition issued in 1875), and there is no memoir to elucidate any but the Dartford area; but in 1925 the geology of the Canterbury district was described by Messrs. Dewey, Wooldridge, Cornes and Brown in the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, vol. XXXVI, pp. 257–290, and Messrs. Wooldridge & Kirkaldy read a paper to that Association this April on the physiographic evolution of north-east Kent, which throws much light on the problem presented by the Fordwich flints.

Formerly the port of Canterbury, Fordwich lies on the right or southern bank of the Great Stour opposite Sturry, and at the foot of a steep hill, which rises to 150 ft. and leads to an elevated plain between the valleys of the Great and Little Stour. In the angle between the road leading due southfrom Fordwich and that from Stodmarsh to Canterbury, west of Moat Cottages (6 in. O.S. map, Kent, XLVI, N.E.), gravel has been worked over a considerable area, the depth being about 7 feet on the east and over 20 feet at the west end. The nearest bench-mark is 151·4 feet and the base of the gravel on the west is therefore about 130 feet O.D., rising to the east. The tongue of high ground between the rivers is covered in patches with gravel and brick-earth resting on Thanet Sand, and forms a plateau about 5 miles long at about the 100 ft. level.

The sub-crag “stone bed” has been described by many writers and there is now a general consensus of opinion that it represents the non-floatable débris of the Tertiary land surface spread out by the advancing Crag sea and sealed in beneath the sands, clays and gravels of the shelly crag. In Norfolk the stone bed rests immediately upon the chalk. At the present time, when most of the formerly numerous chalk pits are no longer worked, sections are scarce. The best available opportunities for examining the stone bed are provided by the cliff section from Weybourne to Sheringham, and the beach and foreshore exposures from Beeston to East Runton.

At Weybourne, to the east of the old coast-guard cottages, the chalk rises abruptly from beneath the chalky boulder-clay of the Great Eastern glaciation which cuts down below tide-level to the westward; and soon attains a height of about twenty feet above the pebble-bank. For the first few hundred yards the chalk is very disturbed, flints from the stone bed, patches of very shelly crag and fragments of chalk being inextricably mixed in the upper portion, though the chalk four feet below the surface shows the flint layers apparently undisturbed. In about three hundred yards the stone bed becomes continuous, with varying thicknesses of the crag gravels and sands separating it from the glacial beds above. In thickness the stone bed varies from six to nine inches, occasionally reaching a foot, and tending to become rather thicker as it stretches eastward.

The remarkable series of deposits, known as “The Cromer Forest Bed,” is of never-failing interest to a great number of people. So far as we know no other part of England, and possibly no other part of the world, can boast of an accumulation precisely comparable to the Forest Bed. It was laid down when the present river Rhine flowed northwards through what is now the North Sea, and at a time separated from to-day by several hundreds of thousands of years. East Anglia, and no doubt other parts of the northern hemisphere, was then enjoying a warm climate, and was inhabited by herds of great game animals, and hunting people who left behind them a vast number of flint implements which delight, and in some cases, puzzle modern archaeologists. But there are other things than flint implements which puzzle archaeologists. In these days the mere finding of a humanly-flaked flint in a geological deposit is not the alpha and omega of the archæologist's task.

In June, 1927, Mr. H. H. Halls noticed that the footpath beside the main Cambridge line of the L.N.E.R. had been made up with gravel. With the then recent discovery of implementiferous gravels at Whitlingham fresh in his mind he scrutinised the gravel carefully and soon found definite flakes. With some difficulty the gravel was traced to its source, and proved to come from Messrs. J. &. J Colman's Carrow works, where to extensive alterations were in progress. By the courtesy of the Directors, Mr. Halls was enabled to visit the site and examine the sections exposed. No flakes were seen in situ, but the workmen were instructed what to look for, and he arranged that any find of apparent interest should be preserved for his inspection. Throughout the rest of the year Mr. Halls regularly visited the site and a number of flakes were recovered, and fragments of bone, too decayed for identification, were seen.

Early in 1928 the Rev. T. C. Rae found the end of a broken hand-axe—a promise of future discoveries—and in February a good hand-axe was recovered from a sand layer 12 feet below the top of the section. The same deposit also yielded a worked flake of Chellean type, evidently derived from an older deposit, as well as some fresh-looking flakes with prominent bulbs. Finds of coarse scrapers and worked flakes continued steadily, and early in July a mammoth tooth, too disintegrated for preservation, prepared us for the discovery of a large portion of tusk, over three feet long.

The purpose of this paper is to put on record the discovery of various sites, containing traces of prehistoric man, in the neighbourhood of Bombay.

The area of greatest importance is that of Worli. It is a cotton milling suburb of Bombay, distant some 4 miles from the Fort, and is situated on low lying marshy ground and bounded to the West by a low steep hill having a maximum height of 100 ft. O.D., and consisting of igneous basalt overlying amygdaloidal trap with a dyke of F.W. strata between. This dyke contains fossils of marsh tortoises, frogs and plants resembling bulrushes. The basalt is capped with red earth which is decomposing trap, and contains nodules of agate and blocks of chert. West of the hill is the Arabian Sea. The northern extremity of this hill ends in a spur which juts out into the sea, and here is the fishing village of Koliwada, consisting of mud huts.

As is known, there exists a widespread deposit of what I have called the Upper Chalky Boulder Clay, on the high ground in the neighbourhood of Ipswich, Suffolk. This accumulation is especially well developed to the north and east of the town where it forms the more or less flat plateau, the surface of which lies at approximately 150 O.D. I have already recorded the discoveries of flint implements in the Upper Chalky Boulder Clay in the brickfield of Bolton & Co., Ltd., to the north of Ipswich, and elsewhere. From these discoveries, which include that of an Early Mousterian hand-axe, of necessity re-described in this paper, I have concluded that the Upper Chalky Boulder Clay was laid down by an ice-sheet present in East Anglia at the close of Acheulean times, and is to be referred to the 3rd Glacial Period of this area. It is now my purpose to illustrate and describe three further specimens of Acheulean hand-axes derived from a deposit exposed in various sections in the plateau to the east of Ipswich.

Common sense and simple experiment have already indicated certain ways in which some of the more common forms of Upper Palaeolithic implements may have been held. Thus for example, there is a general consensus of opinion that knife blades were held either by the butt end only, or by the butt with the index finger extended along the back of the tool. When however, we come to consider other types of tools, such as the scrapers, we find that there are a number of possible ways in which such tools may be held. The actual way or ways in which these tools were held becomes therefore, largely a matter of conjecture unless we can fortify our opinion by relevant facts relating to some particular mode or modes of prehension.

To guide us in selecting the particular way in which a tool was held from the many possible ways in which it could be held, we have the following factors:—

(i) The general shape of the tool.

(ii) The character of the traces of wear on the cutting edge due to use.

(iii) The situation and character of any special trimming which may have been made to facilitate prehension.

(iv) The degree of comfort or freedom from constraint with which a tool may be used in a given position.

(v) The frequency of occurrence of tools of certain lengths and widths which are comparable with the average dimensions of the human hand when gripping an object in certain ways.

(vi) The mode of prehension of stone tools adopted by existing primitive races.

The Raised Beaches on the marine plain between Portsmouth and Brighton are well-known. With the lowest beach at Brighton we are not here concerned. The chief exposures of the so-called 100 ft. beach lie between Chichester and Arundel. In this area the rock platform of the marine plain consists of Chalk and Eocene, and these together with the overlying beach deposits are generally covered by Coombe Rock. The true beach consists of a shingle of varying degrees of coarseness, and though generally associated with a deposit of fine soft sand known locally as “lug sand,” the term “beach” will be used in this paper of the former deposit only.

The implements here described have been obtained from four different beach exposures. Those at Pear Tree Knapp, East Hampnett, and in Aldingbourne Park clearly form part of a single beach, the surface of which ranges from 80 to 90 ft. above O.D. The fourth exposure in Slindon Park, where the beach reaches 135 ft. will be described separately (see Fig. 1). From this pit in 1912, Dr. Eliot Curwen obtained an Acheulean hand-axe, whilst Mr. Fowler has more recently described ten artefacts from the same site, though non e was found in situ.

The area which Mr. Reginald Smith asked me to watch since 1922 is that of the upper reaches of the River Wey from Alton to Farnham, a ten mile stretch of the valley of the Wey which in the 18th century was described by Arthur Young as “the finest ten miles in England.”

To-day the Wey follows a zig-zag course some 50 ft. below the Railway Terrace on the South, and the opposite terrace on the North, on which the village of Bentley (Hants.) is built. Above this lowest terrace of the Wey, deeply covered with a pale stratified gravel of the river drift, is another terrace about 100 ft. above this river, also much gravelled with stratified river drift heavily iron stained. Then still ascending we come to the top of the Alice Holt spur known as the Alice Holt—Bourne plateau on which there are three levels, all much gravelled, but with contorted drift as opposed to the river drift of the terraces on the Northern slope.

This Alice Holt spur is the northern of three spurs that run from Alice Holt to the Waverley Valley: here the river makes a right angle with the Alton–Farnham Valley as it turns south immediately east of Farnham town. The area watched measures in all some 20 square miles.

Since the publication of the 1926 Report on these excavations much important work has been accomplished, four pits, all of the intermediate mining phase, have been completely excavated and a fifth, (Pit No. 12) commenced. In addition, 32 sections have been dug, chiefly in the West Field, which have confirmed the evidence already published and provided further important evidence as to the extent and nature of the mining activities in general.