PREHISTORIC ARCHEOLOGY IN YORKSHIRE 43 



Upper Purple clay of the coast does not contain these erratics, being a 

 deposit of the western ice. 



However this may be, the clay at Kelsey overlies sands and gravels 

 usually considered to be the moraine of the western ice. They have 

 yielded bones and teeth of mammoth, rhinoceros, reindeer, bison and 

 walrus. In them Burchell found several flint implements, of which he 

 figures a Levallois flake and an ovate hand-axe, and which he refers to 

 the Early Mousterian culture. These appear to be the first Yorkshire 

 implements from a deposit containing Pleistocene fauna. 



In 1922 R. A. Smith figured a flint implement found at a depth of 4 ft. 

 in undisturbed boulder-clay in Lower Eskdale, N.R. He compared it to 

 Mousterian points (43). 



As the writer has not yet been able to examine the sections or the 

 implements recorded by Collins and Burchell, he is not in a position to 

 criticise their conclusions, which, it must be admitted, have not met with 

 general acceptance (37). That their researches are serious attempts to 

 throw light on the Palseolithic Age in Yorkshire cannot, however, be 

 gainsaid, whatever the ultimate verdict may be. 



Mesolithic Age. 



The researches of Woodhead (46) into the history of vegetation on the 

 southern Pennines have shown that post-glacial times can be subdivided 

 into an Arctic Period, c. 10000-7000 B.C. ; a warm Boreal Period, 

 7000-5000 B.C. ; and a wet Atlantic Period, 5000-3000 B.C. It is possible 

 that the Arctic Period was contemporaneous with the deposition of the 

 Hessle clay in East Yorkshire. In the Boreal Period the more genial and 

 drier climate enabled scrub and woodland, interspersed with dry sandy 

 heaths, to spread over the southern Pennines, now treeless and thickly 

 clothed with peat formed in the wetter climates of the Atlantic and later 

 periods. 



On the original sandy surface below the peat thousands of pygmy- 

 flint implements and other tools of the post-Palaeolithic or Mesolithic 

 Age have been discovered at altitudes above 1,000 ft. on the Huddersfield 

 Pennines by Buckley (7-9), Petch (31), Woodhead (46), and others. 

 They are recorded by Armstrong from the Sheffield Moors (4). They 

 occur on the northern Pennines, and also on the Eastern Moorlands, 

 where Elgee (i8) has observed sites below shallow peat at 800-1,300 ft. 



These implements were the work of tribes of food-gatherers and hunters, 

 who wandered over and camped on the high, drier sandy grounds during 

 the genial Boreal Period. They avoided the swamps of the valleys and 

 lowlands, though there seems no reason why they should not have camped 

 on the many sandy tracts in those areas. 



The Pennine pygmy-flints have been divided into a broad blade industry 

 resembling the early Tardenoisian culture of Belgium, and a narrow blade 

 industry almost certainly originating from the Aurignacian culture of 

 Upper Palaeolithic times, and so well developed at Cresswell in Derbyshire. 

 Aurignacian chert flakes and tools have been found on Windy Hill 

 (1,000 ft.), on the Pennines west of Huddersfield, below a densely packed 

 early Tardenoisian floor containing over 5,000 flints, including 100 broad 



