502 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913. 



afterwards I visited the place, where two laborers were at work digging the 

 gravel for small repairs to the roads. As this excavation was situated about 

 four miles north of the limit where the occurrence of flints overlying the 

 Wealden strata is recorded I was much interested and made a close examina- 

 tion of the bed. I asked the workmen if they had found bones or other fossils 

 there. As they did not appear to have noticed anything of the sort I urged 

 them to preserve anything that they might find. Upon one of my subsequent 

 visits to the pit, one of the men handed to me a small portion of an unusually 

 thick human parietal bone. I immediately made a search, but could find noth- 

 ing more nor had the men noticed anything else. The bed is full of tabular 

 pieces of ironstone closely resembling this piece of skull in color and thickness ; 

 and, although I made many subsequent searches, I could not hear of any fur- 

 ther find nor discover anything — in fact, the bed seemed to be quite 

 unfossiliferous. 



It was not until some years later, in the autumn of 1911, on a visit to the 

 spot, that I picked up, among the rain-washed spoil heaps of the gravel pit, 

 another and larger piece belonging to the frontal region of the same skull, in- 

 cluding a portion of the left superciliary ridge * * *. 



I took the bones to Dr. A. Smith Woodward at the British Museum (Natural 

 History) for comparison and determination. He was immediately impressed 

 with the importance of the discovery, and we decided to employ labor, and to 

 make a systematic search among the spoil heaps and gi'avel as soon as the 

 floods had abated, for the gravel pit is more or less under water during five 

 or six months of the year. We accordingly gave up as much time as we could 

 spare since last spring (1912) and completely turned over and sifted what 

 spoil material remained ; we also dug up and sifted such portions of the gravel 

 as had been left undisturbed by the workmen * * *. 



At Piltdown the gravel bed occurs beneath a few inches of the surface soil 

 and varies in thickness from 3 to 5 feet * * *. 



Portions of the bed are rather finely stratified, and the materials are usually 

 cemented together by ii'on oxide, so that a pick is often needed to dislodge 

 portions — more especially at one particular horizon near the base. It is in 

 this last mentioned stratum that all the fossil bones and teeth discovered in 

 situ by us have occurred. The stratum is easily distinguished in the appended 

 photograph (pi. 5) by being of the darkest shade and just above the bedi'ock. 



The gi'avel is situated on a well-defined plateau of large area * * * and 

 lies about 80 feet above the level of the main stream of the Ouse. 



Since the deposition of the gravel the river has cut through the 

 plateau, both with its main stream and its principal branch, to this 

 extent. 



Considering the amount of material excavated and sifted by us, the speci- 

 mens discovered were numerically small and localized. 



Apparently the whole or greater portion of the human skull had been shat- 

 tered by the workmen, who had thrown away the pieces unnoticed. Of these 

 we recovered from the spoil heaps as many fragments as possible. In a 

 somewhat deeper depression of the undisturbed gravel I found the right half 

 of a human mandible. So far as I could judge, guiding myself by the position 

 of a tree 3 or 4 yards away, the spot was identical with that upon which the 

 men were at work when the first portion of the cranium was found several 

 years ago. Dr. Woodward also dug up a small portion of the occipital bone 

 of the skull from within a yard of the point where the jaw was discovered and 

 at precisely the same level. The jaw appeared to have been broken at the 

 symphysis and abraded, perhaps when it lay fixed In the grarel and before 



