Palaeolithic Archaeology c.448000-10800 BC

Comments

Glasgow Museums has a small collection of Palaeolithic artefacts and related material, which broadly dates from around 448,000 – 10,800 BC, spanning some of the Lower Palaeolithic, as well as the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. The Palaeolithic (‘Old Stone Age’) is the earliest, and longest, period of prehistory. During this time humans evolved. They hunted wildlife and gathered other wild foods. Fire was first used in this period, and people camped in open-air sites and used caves and rock shelters for occupation. Further, people made the first tools, and the first artworks were created on the walls of caves and in the form of portable objects of art. In addition, people first began to formally bury their dead, with some of the remains of the deceased showing evidence of care of the injured, the old and the sick. During the Palaeolithic the area now known as the British Isles was subject to a series of ice ages which shaped the land and affected the environment greatly, in turn affecting the ability of people to settle there. The British Isles was linked to Continental Europe at times by ice sheets and, in warmer periods, by ‘Doggerland’, a vast landscape which is now submerged under the North Sea. These warmer periods were accompanied by rising sea levels and changes in vegetation and in the types of wildlife present. In short, this climate change affected where and how people lived, and it also affected the survival of archaeological evidence from this time. Due to this natural climate change, evidence of Palaeolithic activity in Scotland is rare, and is limited to the Late Upper Palaeolithic. As a result of this, the Palaeolithic material held in Glasgow Museums’ collection is mainly from England and France. The Palaeolithic material from England includes items from the Lower Palaeolithic sites of Broom, on the Devon/Dorset border, and Swanscombe in Kent. Palaeolithic material from a variety of sites around London, originally in the collection of Dr Frank Corner (and later acquired by the Glaswegian archaeologist and collector Mr Ludovic McLellan Mann) is also present. In addition, there are single finds from a number of further sites in the south of England. Of particular note are objects from several sites which fall within the UNESCO World Heritage Site of ‘Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley’, in the Dordogne region of southern France. This includes material from the sites of Le Moustier, Abri de la Madeleine, and Abri de Cro-Magnon, for example. In addition, French National Monuments such as La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Saint-Acheul are also represented by objects in the collection. Artefact types comprise mainly stone tools such as hand-axes, scrapers, blades, cores, and knives, and there are also animal remains, such as antler fragments and preserved animal bones and teeth. In addition, there are a small number of reconstruction models of early humans in this collection, which were acquired in the late 1930s, probably for use in displays about human evolution. Some of these models relate to the famous hoax of ‘Piltdown Man’. The Palaeolithic material in Glasgow Museums’ collections was acquired from the 1890s until the 1950s. This is now effectively a closed part of the collection, with no new acquisitions likely to be added to this group.

Broader term

Archaeology

Staff Contact

Jane Flint