Beeches pit one

There seems to be agreement that one of the milestones in humans becoming what they are was the invention of cooking, a device which greatly reduced the time needed to take in energy from food. A major contribution to providing the energy needed to drive a big brain, a contribution which might be said to have triggered the upward spiral which has continued ever since.

I was therefore interested to read about a site in Suffolk, Beeches Pit, at which evidence of cooking had been found dating back around 400,000 years, that is to say a long time before the end of the last ice age, in one of the inter-glacials, and one of the earliest such sites in Europe. The Africans, I should add, appeared to have had fire for a long time before that, maybe millions of years before that.

A visit was clearly indicated, and a visit was duly made in the margins of our recent pilgrimage to Ely.

The site was tracked down to West Stow, near Bury St. Edmunds, the site of an Anglo-Saxon village reconstruction, where we parked, used the helpful facilities and took directions. The helpful facilities seemed, off season at least, to serve the local community just as much as visitors, in much the same way as those at Brading Roman Villa. See reference 3.

So off across the road into the equestrian centre, where we found no-one to ask, so pushed on into the woods beyond, where after not many minutes we came to a shallow crater, clearly the brick pit in question and containing a fair amount of archeological litter, some of which is illustrated above. More to come.

Pit roughly circular, maybe fifty yards diameter, ten feet deep. On a gentle, wooded slope, a little above the Lark, a tributary of the Ouse, now some hundreds of yards to the south. Lots of flints and flint fragments lying about, the accessible flints which were presumably the big draw, all those years ago. Not all that many beech trees, although there were some grand old pollards in the vicinity, rather like, although rather younger than the pollard oaks on Epsom Common. In the pit itself, mainly young oak, sycamores and ash, as one would expect of a brick pit not that long out of use. A few pines round about. At least trees with needles: I am not sure if that necessarily makes them proper pines.

On exit we were challenged by an Australian emerging from a posh wooden hut who explained that we were trespassing on his land, land which contained a lot of very valuable bloodstock, some used in films and some the property of sheikhs. This last explaining the dubious looking types who had emerged earlier from a less posh wooden hut and whom we had taken for eastern Europeans mucking out stables on minimum wages or worse. But when we had explained ourselves he calmed down a bit, only suggesting that next time we call in the hut intended for the control of visitors, which was fair enough. We had not noticed it on the way in.

He did not seem to mind that we had abstracted an archaeologist's measuring stick and an important flint.

PS: we have yet to find out what prompted the archaeologists to dig here in the first place - with the first digs having taken place as long ago as the 1870's. See reference 1, only skimmed by me.

Reference 1: Humans in the Hoxnian: habitat, context and fire use at Beeches Pit, West Stow, Suffolk, UK - Preece and others - 2006 - open access.

Reference 2: On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe - Wil Roebroeksa and Paola Villa - 2011 - open access.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/roman-villa.html.

Group search keys: elb, bpb