Beeches Pit

About

Beeches Pit is an archaeological site in Suffolk, England, dated to around 0.4 million years ago. It contains palaeoenvironmental remains, and is particularly notable because it provides evidence of the human use of fire, the earliest in Britain and one of the earliest in Europe. In addition, knapping debris and Acheulean hand axes have been found.

It is one of the richest sites in England for evidence of human activity during that period, and the hand axes are the "earliest post-Anglian handaxe-making horizon in Britain". The site is in an old brick pit, near West Stow, south of Thetford Forest in Suffolk. Biostratigraphy, amino acid racemisation, and thermoluminescence dating on burnt flint confirm the dating of Marine Isotope Stage 11.

The first geological description and record came from a man named Sydney Barber Josiah Skertchly, who was then working in Suffolk for the British Geological Survey, in the 1870s. Further geological research took place between 1991 and 2006; excavations were done by John Gowlett in the 1990s, focusing on two areas, named AF and AH, on the pit's northwestern side. The pit evidences a rich fauna including mollusks, wood mice, fallow deer, and other animals...