'The Boxgrove Horse Butchery Site: Solving a Puzzle from the Deep Past'

The internationally important Palaeolithic site of Boxgrove is an incredible, high-resolution record of human behaviour dating to almost half a million years ago. A series of activity areas, concentrations of stone tools, sometimes accompanied by faunal remains, are preserved in sediments left behind during the silting up and eventual burial of a large embayment now located in West Sussex. This lecture focuses on one such locality, named the Horse Butchery Site, where evidence for the dismemberment of a horse was perfectly preserved in the silts and clays of intertidal mudflats. Extensive programmes of refitting have since been undertaken to piece back together the hundreds flint artefacts to establish what activities was taking place at the site. The results show a vivid picture of an early human group working over a period of just a few hours to make the tools necessary to butcher a large horse. We consider what short, intense periods of activity mean in both the evolution of human social behaviour and landscape use.