STONE AGE HAND AXES REVEAL FIRST INHABITANTS OF ARUNDEL

“Reaching Out - Arundel Museum
for the whole community”,​a project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
STONE AGE HAND AXES REVEAL FIRST INHABITANTS OF ARUNDEL
Volunteers at Arundel Museum have identified two flint hand axes in
the museum’s stores that they believe are evidence of the area’s
earliest inhabitants.
Arundel Museum’s Curator, Katy Elliott Viney, is delighted with the
discovery.
“This is very exciting for Arundel Museum. We moved to our new
location in 2013 and as with all house moves it’s fantastic to
rediscover treasures. The museum acquired these hand axes in the
1960s, three decades before the internationally important finds at
Boxgrove. We now understand the significance of these hand axes
because of our fantastic volunteers,” explained Katy.
Volunteers Vicki Wells and David Shilston identified the flint hand
axes in one of the museum’s storage boxes.
“It was amazing to unwrap the flint tools and realize how significant
they might be”, said Vicki, a geologist and former BBC producer.
The duo suspect the hand axes were made half a million years ago
by the same early humans that hunted and made flint tools at
Boxgrove, less than ten miles from Arundel.
David, a former President of the Geological Society of London, said,
“We realised the potential importance of the museum’s hand axes
when we saw that they had been found nearby at Slindon, in similar
geological strata to the Boxgrove site.”
Dr Matthew Pope, Senior Research Fellow at University College will
visit Arundel Museum soon to help shed light on the hand axes.
What started as a project to audit fossils in storage, has turned into a
thrilling archaeological and geological journey with our earliest
ancestors, using flint from the local chalk to cut up the carcasses of
prehistoric rhinoceros and giant deer that lived in the area.
The Museum is developing a new display about the hand axes and
the oldest inhabitants of Arundel, with ‘outreach boxes’ for schools to
investigate geological time and human evolution.

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