Establishing Limits of late Neanderthal Presence in Britain.

For over a quarter of a century the late Neanderthal record of Britain has been considered to relate entirely to a short period between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago. This episode of reoccupation is thought to have followed almost 120,000 years of absence of any human species in Britain and ended with the appearance of Homo sapiens in the region after 43,000 years ago. The data this hiatus-reoccupation paradigm is based on is very limited, has been challenged by specific findings from development-responsive archaeology and looks very different to the records documented for adjacent areas of northern France and the Channel Islands.  This project will review the British record for Late Middle Palaeolithic sites, contemporary faunal assemblages, stone artefact technology and dated interventions in Quaternary contexts from MIS 6 to the end of MIS 3. This process will allow for the identification of previously undated sites with artefacts or modified animal bone and apply direct dating of fauna through C14 or by OSL dating of associated sediments. This programme of scientific dating will be interpreted alongside a geoarchaeological appraisal of each record, direct comparison with the continental sequence and the scrutinization of our sampling coverage and biases. The aim is to test the reliability of the hiatus-reoccupation paradigm and provide a new, robust characterisation of the record of the last Neanderthal populations in northwest Europe.