The National Ice Age Network (NIAN)
The NIAN is an Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund initiative administered by English Heritage. It seeks to strengthen contacts between, and create an inclusive and supportive network for everyone interested in the Ice Age. The initiative focuses on the Pleistocene (Ice Age) remains to be found in England’s sand and gravel quarries, including sediments containing fossils relating to past environments as well as archaeological evidence for some of the country’s earliest human inhabitants.
Although a resource of great importance for science and of widespread public interest (e.g. mammoths, Neanderthals, climate change), these remains have often not received the attention devoted to more recent environmental and archaeological evidence.
Sand and gravel quarrying has benefited geology, palaeontology and archaeology enormously. Deep excavations for commercial quarrying have revealed geological sequences, the fossil remains of plants and animals, and the stone tools of our ancestors – the raw materials needed to reconstruct the Ice Age world. Quarrying, however, is also a destructive process – much is lost without record – and the benefits of aggregates quarrying to reconstructing the Ice Age world cannot be realised unless the fossils and archaeological remains are recorded. The challenge of monitoring these quarries for significant finds can only be achieved through partnership: between geologists, palaeontologists and archaeologists, between professionals and amateurs, but most of all with the aggregates industry. It is the quarry workers themselves who, day in and day out, have the best chance of making the important discoveries. The inclusive grouping of organisations and individuals sharing the goal of bringing the Ice Age world to light will be known as the National Ice Age Network.
The NIAN currently operates from regional centres at Royal Holloway University of London and the University of Birmingham, with responsibilities for research and monitoring in the south-east and Midlands respectively.
Information from www.iceage.bham.ac.uk