Archaeologists Dig Up More Ice Age Remains At Creswell Crags

Creswell Crags is a limestone gorge containing important evidence of Ice Age life. Photo Creswell Heritage Trust

Archaeologists searching for clues about Ice Age artists have completed a major excavation in Nottinghamshire, unearthing more than 1,000 finds.

A team from the University of Sheffield and The British Museum conducted the dig in Church Hole cave at Creswell Crags between August 7 and 18 2006, the site of the only British discovery of Ice Age rock art.

The rock art discoveries, made in 2003 and 2004, are one of the most important finds from the Palaeolithic era in Britain, dating back 13,000 years. Other rock art has been found in Britain, but was mostly made some 8,000 years after the animal and bird images found at Creswell.

Archaeologists from Sheffield University and the British Museum conducted the dig. Photo Creswell Heritage Trust

Church Hole had been excavated in the 19th century, and the latest dig aimed to first explore the Victorian ‘spoil heap’ of discarded earth and materials outside the cave.

Dr Paul Pettitt, leading the project, explained: “We know that Church Hole was excavated very rapidly by the Victorians in the 1870s, and as a result very little is known about the animals and people who inhabited this cave during the Ice Age.”

The team have now been able to find the original Ice Age sediments below and examine the bones and artefacts from that period and later. The finds indicate that there has been activity at the gorge since the Ice Age onwards with later remains from the Roman and medieval ages and beyond.

Many bones of now extinct animals were found, like the leg bone of an arctic hare (not found in Britain since the end of the last Ice Age) and teeth of hyenas, which would have used Church Hole as a den some 25,000 years ago.

There was also a reindeer antler showing signs of being gnawed by hyenas, a mammoth tooth, woolly rhino bones and evidence of human flint working and tools.

A fragment of an awl, used for piercing animal hide and made from the tibia of an arctic hare, was found to have regular scratch marks on it, akin to the lines on a ruler. A similar find at Cheddar Gorge like this one indicates that the people who lived at Creswell Crags may be of the same group of hunter-gatherers.

This engraved rock is thought to be an early games board. Photo Creswell Heritage Trust

Another fascinating discovery was of a deeply engraved stone, thought to be a ‘nine men’s morris’ board – a game of possibly Egyptian origin popular in the Roman and medieval periods. Further analysis will be carried out to date it to one of those periods.

There was one possible find of Ice Age art, which researchers will be examining further, and the excavation will provide the archaeologists with enough information to plan a further major dig at the site next year.

The last Ice Age started about 50,000 years ago and ended around 8,000 BC. Ice covered Britain as far south as Wales and the midlands and the south was frozen tundra. Temperatures were about minus eight degrees Celsius.

Some 80 items of rock art were found - the outlines of this stag have been hightlighted. Photo Creswell Heritage Trust

More than 80 engraved figures were found in the soft limestone at Church Hole during the 2003 and 2004 research. Subjects include horses, bison, birds and stags and are similar to those found in continental Europe.

Quit fooling around, the lot of ya.

Carbon dating 'might be wrong by 10,000 years'
by Roger Highfield
Saturday 30 June 2001
An Anglo-American team found large variations in levels of the carbon-14 isotope, used as the basis of carbon dating, preserved in a 19in stalagmite recovered from a submerged cave in the Blue Holes of the Bahamas, limestone caverns created when sea levels were nearly 330ft lower than today. These findings suggested dramatic changes in the amount of radioactive carbon in Earth's atmosphere during the last Ice Age, much greater than previously thought, probably as a result of changes in the strength of the planet's magnetic field. The field shields Earth from cosmic rays that create carbon-14 in the atmosphere, altering levels of the isotope during the past 45,000 years... Their study could force a reappraisal of when certain events occurred, notably in the period when modern humans lived alongside Neanderthals in Europe... Dr David Richards of the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, made the study with colleagues in Arizona and Minnesota. He said: "Beyond about 20,000 years ago there are some dramatic swings in radiocarbon concentration, which means the age offset between the radiocarbon age and true calendar age can be up to 8,000 years." Radiocarbon dating, which depends on the steady decay of carbon-14, is less reliable if an artefact is older than 16,000 years. But the changes in radiocarbon, and dating, fluctuate greatly up to 45,000 years, the limit of the study.
Extremely large variations of atmospheric 14C concentration during the last glacial period
Beck JW, Richards DA, Edwards RL,
Silverman BW, Smart PL, Donahue DJ,
Hererra-Osterheld S, Burr GS,
Calsoyas L, Jull AJ, Biddulph D.
Science
pub 2001 May 10
A long record of atmospheric 14C concentration, from 45 to 11 thousand years ago (ka), was obtained from a stalagmite with thermal-ionization mass-spectrometric 230Th and accelerator mass-spectrometric 14C measurements. This record reveals highly elevated Delta14C between 45 and 33 ka, portions of which may correlate with peaks in cosmogenic 36Cl and 10Be isotopes observed in polar ice cores. Superimposed on this broad peak of Delta14C are several rapid excursions, the largest of which occurs between 44.3 and 43.3 ka. Between 26 and 11 ka, atmospheric Delta14C decreased from approximately 700 to approximately 100 per mil, modulated by numerous minor excursions. Carbon cycle models suggest that the major features of this record cannot be produced with solar or terrestrial magnetic field modulation alone but also require substantial fluctuations in the carbon cycle.
Disaster that struck the ancients
Professor Fekri Hassan, from University College London, UK, wanted to solve the mystery, by gathering together scientific clues. His inspiration was the little known tomb in southern Egypt of a regional governor, Ankhtifi. The hieroglyphs there reported "all of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating their children". Dismissed as exaggeration and fantasy by most other Egyptologists, Fekri was determined to prove the writings were true and accurate. He also had to find a culprit capable of producing such misery. He studied the meticulous records, kept since the 7th Century, of Nile floods. He was amazed to see that there was a huge variation in the size of the annual Nile floods - the floods that were vital for irrigating the land. But no records existed for 2,200BC. Then came a breakthrough - a new discovery in the hills of neighbouring Israel. Mira Bar-Matthews of the Geological Survey of Israel had found a unique record of past climates, locked in the stalactites and stalagmites of a cave near Tel Aviv. What they show is a sudden and dramatic drop in rainfall, by 20%. It is the largest climate event in 5,000 years. And the date? 2,200 BC.

In Horus vol II no 1, a journal published by the late David Griffard, Barry Fell was interviewed. Among other things:

We learned that seals were coming to a bad end and being mummified by nature in Antarctica in 1200 A.D. That was interesting and we wondered what was happening in Antarctica at that time...one of the technicians... noticed that a seal carcass that he himself had shot for dog-meat and that got left out through the winter... [looked] just like the mummified seals that they had been sending in. So without telling too many people what he was doing, he sent this mummified seal to be carbon-dated and do you know it was dated to 1200 A.D., and he had shot it the year before. When that was made public it really caused a storm...

We had two successive volcanic eruptions on the island of Tonga. There were human remains, then a layer of lava, then more human remains, then a layer of lava. We took charcoal out of both layers and had them both dated -- and we didn't tell them, the dating people, which layer which came from -- and to our amazement we learned that the whole island of Tonga has rotated through 180 degrees and is now upside down. The top layer is older than the bottom layer of the charcoal.

I asked you what you were trying to say as you had many (apparently unrelated) points in a single post--some of which I disagreed with.

You responded: Barry Fell was a scientist who had an outside interest in ancient languages and inscriptions, and he was right much more often than he was wrong.

Radiocarbon dating has pitfalls; the Ulu Burun wreck RC dating fiasco is an example.

The message though is, Blam and I hate to see perfectly good topics on history and archaeology wrecked by crevo bloodbaths.

I have a low regard for Barry Fell based on an examination of some of his books. This opinion is generally mirrored by the archaeological profession. You should be able to google reviews in American Antiquity and other journals.

Radiocarbon dating: This is a subject I know well, and I question the nature of your post concerning it. You cited an article several years old dealing with one small area of the literature. I believe that one article by itself leaves an erroneous impression of the overall accuracy of the method. It should be balanced with, perhaps, the nice calibration curve based on bristlecone pines extending some 12,600 years BP.

I made no mention of the crevo issue at all. I am aware of your feelings (you and Blam) on the issue and have refrained from bringing the subject into these threads.

As far as the Hassan post, that was interesting. I knew him in grad school (he was a young professor at the time) and it is nice to see that he is carrying some parts of the western method of archaeology back to Egypt.

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