Prehistoric Ebbsfleet Excavations and Research in Advance of High Speed 1 and South Thameside Development Route 4, 1989-2003 Appendices, Supplementary Text

The construction of High Speed 1 (HS1; formerly the Channel Tunnel Rail Link) entailed a major programme of archaeological investigation across Kent, Essex and Greater London. In the Ebbsfleet Valley, a small tributary of the River Thames, a remarkable array of archaeological evidence was discovered, attesting to human occupation spanning a period of 400,000 years. This appendix is one of a series from the last of the HS1 archaeological reports for the Ebbsfleet Valley. It also incorporates evidence recovered during the construction of the South Thameside Development Route 4 (STDR4), a road upgrade funded by Kent County Council for the new Ebbsfleet International Station. The focus is the prehistoric landscape and human occupation of the valley and its hinterland, from the Palaeolithic through the Early Iron Age. This period incorporates fluctuating extremes of climate between harsh sub-arctic conditions when southern Britain would have been a frozen and uninhabitable treeless waste, and warmer interludes, when luxuriant forest was interspersed with grassy plains, rich in what we would now regard as tropical fauna, such as lion, hippopotamus and hyaena.
Please see associated identifier for parent publication ISBN and weblink: Wenban-Smith, F., Stafford, E., Bates, M. and Parfitt S. A. 2020 Prehistoric Ebbsfleet Excavations and Research in Advance of High Speed 1 and South Thameside Development Route 4, 1989-2003 Appendices. Salisbury: Oxford Wessex Archaeology