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| THE SHOTTON PROJECT |  |
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External Links IAA Website English Heritage The Lapworth Museum Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund Council for British Archaeology |
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Handaxes are the main source of archaeological evidence for the activities of our hominid (early human) ancestors. They are found over much of the old world from South Africa to Staffordshire, and were used for over one million years. In Britain, the earliest handaxes date from around 500,000 years ago, with some of the earliest examples from the Midlands. The handaxe ‘culture’ is sometimes referred to as the Acheulean after the site of St Acheul in France where some of the first discoveries of these stone tools were made.
Handaxes are seen by some as a multi-purpose tool and experiments have shown they can be used for different tasks, e.g. animal butchery. The tools are important as they were used by different species of our human ancestors in very different physical and environmental regions over hundreds of thousands of years. The nature of the handaxe form allows it to be created out of very different types of fine-grained rock. In England they are typically made of flint but in the Midlands, where there were few suitable flint sources, they were frequently made of quartzite, chert, and even igneous rocks such as andesitic tuff.
The Palaeolithic stone tools from the Midlands have been discovered and described by various people for over a hundred years. The first discovery came from Saltley in Birmingham in 1894. It has been slow progress since then with only a few largely chance discoveries being made from time to time. However, since the 1960s there have been dramatic increases in the quantity of finds due to the work of two enthusiasts working in Eastern Warwickshire & Leicestershire and Southern Worcestershire respectively. It is hoped that with the work of the Shotton Project will increase the regional database through new discoveries and the documentation of old finds in museums and private collections.
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