Katharine Scott

University of Oxford | OX · St Cross College

This richly illustrated book gives a detailed account of excavations that extended over ten years at Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, following the discovery of a mammoth tusk in 1989. More than 1500 vertebrate fossils and a wealth of other biological material were recorded and recovered, along with 36 stone artefacts attributable to Neanderthals. To...

Picken's Hole (NGR ST 3964 5500) is a mainly collapsed limestone cave on the northern slope of a ridge of the Mendip Hills near Compton Bishop, Somerset. It is one of a small series of caves at about 50 m AOD in a ridge of carboniferous limestone. At the time of its excavation in the 1960s, the accessible cave consisted of a short passage 1-1.5 m a...

In Britain, most large vertebrate assemblages ascribed to MIS 7 include remains of proboscideans—straight-tusked elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus, woolly mammoth Mammuthus primigenius and also a smaller mammoth, unique to this interglacial and often referred to in Britain as the ‘Ilford’ mammoth. Recent studies of the Eurasian mammoths suggest that...

Pleistocene fluvial sediments of the Northmoor Member of the Upper Thames Formation exposed at Latton, Wiltshire, record episodic deposition close to the Churn–Thames confluence possibly spanning the interval from Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 7 to 2. The sequence is dominated by gravel facies, indicating deposition by a high-energy, gravel-bed river...

For much of the Middle and all of the Upper Pleistocene the Upper Thames valley has remained outside the limit of ice advance. The main agents of landform evolution have been the River Thames and its tributaries, which have cut down episodically and in so doing have abandoned a series of river terraces. This study reports the findings of an investi...

A summary is given of the geological, faunal and archaeological information obtained during excavations in the Stanton Harcourt Channel Deposits from 1990 to 1995. The channel deposits underlie the ‘cold-climate’ Stanton Harcourt Gravel Member of the Summertown– Radley Terrace Formation. The Channel sediments are attributed to Oxygen Isotope Stage...

Excavation by Charles McBurney and John Clegg during the early 1960s revealed a sequence with a Mousterian occupation, of which the principal finds were two bout coupé handaxes, stratified close to the base of a Middle Devensian hyaena-den accumulation. The human occupation should belong within the period 64–38 ka with comparative and stratigraphic...

The lower carnassial lengths of spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) in 12 late Pleistocene samples from Britain indicate that, on average, local hyenas of the last (Devensian) glaciation were significantly larger than their last-interglaciation (Ipswichian) counterparts. Together with the tendency for spotted hyena carnassial length to increase with l...

In preliminary reports based on approximately 5000 identified bones from the Haua Fteah, Cyrenaica, E. S. Higgs concluded that changes in the abundance of bovines versus Barbary sheep reflected climatic change from drier (=last interglaciation) to wetter (=last glaciation) and back to drier (=present interglaciation). Higgs also reported the earlie...

The contents of two levels from the cave of La Cotte de Saint-Brelade apparently document two occasions on which man was able to kill a number of woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros of age groups not otherwise represented amongst the bones brought back to the site. Evidence is also discussed which suggests that although the site had previously bee...

RECENT excavations by the South African Museum at a coastal cave situated at Die Kelders some 100 miles east of Cape Town have revealed the earliest definite sheep remains in Sub-Saharan Africa.