Stour Basin Palaeolithic Project

The Stour Basin Palaeolithic Project, funded by English Heritage, took place between February 2013 and March 2015. Its main concern was to improve curation of the Palaeolithic historic environment in the potentially important Stour Basin area, which is also an area of high development pressure. The project carried out a major enhancement of the HER in the project area and produced a broad predictive model that identified and characterised areas of Palaeolithic potential. It has also developed a Toolkit for use of Kent's curators. It also carried out some fieldwork that improved understanding of the Palaeolithic resource in the project area. A staircase of buried terrace deposits was shown to be present in the Chislet area northeast of Canterbury, and robust dating evidence was obtained from one level which can be extrapolated back to tie in with the terrace staircase at Canterbury, some levels of which have produced abundant Palaeolithic remains. It was also confirmed that some plateau brickearth outcrops are considerable earlier than late Devensian, and thus have higher potential than hitherto widely presumed. This latter result has wider ramifications for mapped brickearth deposits beyond the project area.