Experimental Archaeology: Using three Paleolithic flints from Cobham Kent? - A Mystery
By Frank Beresford
De Barri Crawshay found palaeolithic material in the Upper Cray Valley near the northern end of Snag Lane, Cudham in the early 1890s. A full report of these finds is published in Archaeologia Cantiana volume 140 (Beresford 2019, 269 – 284.) However, three flakes (Fig. 1) from this collection which is now curated by the British Museum carry enigmatic inscriptions which provoked further research. The inscriptions read: “Buried in Rosefield Drive 1911 – 1912 by Lionel, Exhumed by De BC Jan 12 – March 15 1921”.
All the flakes have some retouch and have light yellow-brown staining over white patination with ferrous red on the ridges. They show evidence of having been rolled (Figs 1&2). All the Cudham Palaeolithic artefacts were surface finds in a gravel spread.
De Barri Crawshay (1857–1924) collected Palaeolithic material in his search area above Sevenoaks, on the North Downs to the west of the Medway Gap. His extensive collection also included Palaeolithic material from Kent and elsewhere that he bought from others.
However, he is best remembered for his role from 1890 onwards as the third man of the Kentish
Eoliths in partnership with Joseph Prestwich and Benjamin Harrison. Today, eoliths are regarded as the natural products of geological forces (O’Connor 2007, 131).
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Fig 1: Ventral faces of three flakes showing the inscriptions
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Fig 2: Dorsal faces of three flakes
He was a wealthy man whose income was derived from his family’s highly successful steelworks at Cyfarthfa in South Wales which were first taken over by his great great grandfather, Richard Crawshay in the 1790s (Uglow 2014, 201.) His father, Francis Crawshay moved from Wales to Kent in 1867, buying Bradbourne Hall near Sevenoaks in 1867. By 1881, the census shows that De Barri Crawshay, at the age of 23, was married and living with a butler, cook and three maids in his own large newly built home, Rosefield, in Kippington Road, Sevenoaks. It was south of Bradbourne and on the other side of the railway (Fig 3).
In addition to his prehistoric and archaeological studies, he had time to develop a wide range of interests. He was well known in the field of horticulture and, for example, received an Award of Merit from the R.H.S. in May 1897 for his orchids. He was also well known in the Sevenoaks area and London as a singer/recitalist. He was an early photographer, cyclist and motorist and was awarded the OBE for his contribution to the organisation of motor transport in Kent during the First World War. The early cars that he owned were all photographed on the drive at Rosefield. Some of these photographs were recently published in a book (Harding and Goodman, 2009) and provide a useful series of views of the drive in which the three flints were buried (Fig 4).
De Barrie married Rose Mary Young the daughter of the Reverend Walter Young of Templecarne, Co Donegan on the 11th, July 1878.
They had two sons, Lionel Henry De Barri Crawshay born in 1882 and Raymond Vaughan Edwin De Barri Crawshay born in 1885.
Both developed an early interest in Lithics. For many years De Barri kept a flint on his dressing table and much later added the inscription:
“Raymond picked up this flint 7.5.1888 on a road when out with Lionel & their nurse. He brought it to me as “an impleum for Daddy” – his first” (Fig 5).
Both sons led exciting lives. Raymond was one of the few people who lapped Brooklands at over 100mph before the First World War (Fig 6). He went on to be instrumental in the setting up of Shellhaven in the 1920s and later was the owner and general manager of the Southminster gas works in Essex. When the works were nationalised, he became a clock and watch repairer living on a houseboat in Maldon and working from a small shed on the quayside. He was also an excellent organist and repairer of church organs.
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Fig 3: Partial map of Rosefieldand grounds showing the driveway where flakes were buried
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Fig 4: De Barri’s first car – a 1903 Oldsmobile on the Rosefield driveway.
© Amberly Publishing Ltd
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Fig 5: Note of Raymond’s first find
Lionel’s interests ranged from cycling to natural history, particularly botany. Like his father, he took a particular interest in orchids. To all his interests, he brought a systematic approach and careful recording. In the Wellcome Collection, there is a collection of his notebooks containing six volumes on botany and comparative osteology, a register of photographs, and a bicycling diary. (Wellcome Collection GB 0120 MSS.1905-1912A.). His bicycling diary records every mile cycled on runs through the Kent countryside to Bromley, Seal, Otford and Green Street Green, or further afield to the coast at Hythe. It gives monthly breakdowns, comparing this to the previous year’s total. In July 1910, he logged 311 miles; the following July’s total, in 1911, was 600 miles.
Works on his bicycle – new tyres and brakes – are all recorded (Fig 7).
We can now only surmise about Lionel’s thinking when he buried the three Palaeolithic flints from the Cudham collection (Figs 1&2) in the drive at Rosefield in 1911-12. His scientific and systematic approach to his other interests implies that he would have done this with a clear intention. It would appear to be a form of experimental archaeology at a time when the debate about the validity of eoliths was provoking experimental work by others to determine what constituted humanly struck flint material and what had been produced by natural forces (e.g. Warren 1905.) Investigating how stone tools were produced and used by hominins is an area of research with which the Crawshay family would have been familiar.
However, these were genuine Palaeolithic artefacts, and Lionel’s intent here may have been to consider their age by investigating the nature and rate of formation of patination and/or staining. When deprived of its protective cortex and exposed on open ground or underground, flint undergoes a chemical change to its surface which results in a shift in colour; a process known as patination.
Consequently, it can be suggested that one possibility is that Lionel buried the three artefacts, intending to leave them there for a period and, after retrieval, to subsequently compare their patina with that of artefacts that had not been buried to gain some understanding of the age/patination relationship. However, his surviving notebooks do not indicate this. It is unlikely that he would have been able to identify any significant changes and there is no observable difference between the patination of the three artefacts that he used and that of most of the other artefacts from Cudham. While a long time is required for patination which is, therefore, some evidence of antiquity, the nature and rate of formation of a patina depends on so many fortuitous circumstances that it cannot be a reliable guide for dating.
Lionel was never able to complete his experiment. The start of the Great War in 1914 saw De Barri Crawshay in uniform presumably concerning his role in the organisation of motor transport in Kent (Fig 8).
1915 is the last year for which Lionel records any mileage in his bicycling diary. The following year, he enlisted in the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment. Sadly, in May 1917 he died in hospital after immersion when his troopship, RMS Transylvania, was torpedoed in the Mediterranean near Genoa’.
In 1914 both De Barri and Lionel were listed in Archaeologia Cantiana as members of the Kent Archaeological Society, but by 1917 only De Barri’s name remains in the list of members. After the end of the Great War, it was left to De Barri to retrieve the three flakes.
He dug them up from the drive at Rosefield three years later from Jan 12th to March 15th 1921. The date range could imply that they had been buried in different locations along the driveway. Each received a label at this time explaining their significance, and they were presumably kept in a visible place by De Barri as a memory of his son. De Barri wrote the label for Raymond’s first find in 1888 (Fig. 5) on the back of a ticket for a dance in the Club Hall Sevenoaks held on 31st December 1920, and so all four labels were presumably written around the same time.
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Fig 6: Raymond in a high speed car on the driveway at Rosefield Bottom
Fig 7: Lionel with his bicycle
De Barri was also active in field archaeology in 1921. However, he was not interested in extending his extensive collection of Palaeolithic artefacts. On March 27th, just twelve days after he had retrieved the three flakes from the drive at Rosefield, he commenced digging, in Roger’s Field in South Ash “where the ochreous flints are greatest in number upon the surface.” He aimed to prove the existence of “Eoliths in situ”, and he found Eoliths in the “2-ft. and 4-ft. seams” (Fig 9). He read his paper at a London meeting of the
Prehistoric Society of East Anglia at the Society of Antiquaries’ Rooms on March 9th, 1923 and published in the Society’s proceedings for 1924 (Crawshay, 1924.)
The same volume of the proceedings in which De Barri’s Eolith report was published also contained his obituary on page 247. He died on the 26th December 1924 at the age of 67, and his wife Rose had died in 1922. His collections were left to his surviving son Raymond. In February 1925 Raymond added a box to the display cabinet at Rosefield with the following note that had been written by De Barri
(Fig 10) The box contains Lionel’s last lithics collection - some eoliths – that he had collected two months before his death.
In 1929, Raymond sent most of De Barri’s lithic collection and other material to Stevens Auction Rooms in King Street, Covent Garden where they were sold on the 17th April. The three flakes that Lionel had buried 18 years earlier were included although the Cudham collection was spread between several auction lots. The three flakes were included in lot 82 (Fig 11), which was described as “nine drift implements (Knowle) and a number of others.” This vague description lacking most find location names was typical of many of those used in the catalogue.
At this point, the Cudham collection could have been dispersed, but the complete De Barri Crawshay collection was purchased for the Wellcome Collection. During this period the Wellcome Collection was being expanded at a fantastic rate under the instructions of its founder Sir Henry Wellcome and representatives were present at many auctions as well as travelling the world in search of more artefacts. The De Barri
Crawshay collection would have been transferred to its warehouse at Willesden, which was too full to allow access to external researchers. The collection was sorted according to find sites, and the three flakes were recorded on a file card with 20 other artefacts from Cudham (Fig 12). After Sir Henry Wellcome died in 1936, a dispersal of the non-medical material in his collection began.
The British Museum received most of the prehistoric collections, including the Cudham collection in 1965 (Larson, 2009.)
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Fig 8: De Barri in uniform in 1915 in Riverhead Schoolyard
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Fig 9: De Barri Crawshay’s Eoliths “in situ” at South Ash Green, Kent 1921
Raymond married three times, marrying his third wife Mabel Joyce Mitchell just four years before he died in 1966 leaving everything to her in his will. A brief reference was made to the Cudham Palaeolithic material by Joseph Prestwich in 1891 before
De Barri Crawshay had completed his collection. Still, the first full report has only now been published (Beresford, 2019). However, at this distance in time and with no relevant notes available, the reasons for Lionel’s experimental work remains speculative while the three Palaeolithic flakes he used with
Rosefield estate in Kippington Road is now occupied by newer homes.
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Fig 10: De Barri’s note that accompanies Lionel’s last collection of Lithics
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Fig 11: Lot 82
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Fig 12: Welcome Collection file card recording the three flakes
Acknowledgements:
The writer would like to thank the Rev. Christopher Jones and his wife Margaret for providing much information and many of the illustrations used. Margaret’s Aunt was the third wife of Raymond Vaughan Edwin De Barri Crawshay who died in 2011 aged 90 making Margaret the sole beneficiary of her will. Also Clare Lodge of the Bexley Archaeology Group for her help with making contact.
He would also like to thank Nicola Embery, Managing Editor of Amberly Publishing Ltd., for readily permitting to use Fig 4 from their publication “Motoring Around
Kent – the First Fifty Years.” Finally, he would like to thank Nicholas Ashton and the staff in the Sturge Room at the British Museum (Franks House) for their help.
References
Beresford F.R., 2019, A Re-examination of the Late Nineteenth-Century Palaeolithic Finds in the Upper Cray Area, Bromley, Kent. Archaeologia Cantiana 140, 269 –284.
Crawshay de B., 1924, Eoliths Found “in situ” At South Ash, Kent. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East
Anglia 4, Issue 02, 155–162.
Harding T. & Goodman B., 2009,
Motoring Around Kent – the First Fifty Years. Amberley
Larson F., 2009, An Infinity of Things – How Sir Henry Wellcome collected the World. Oxford University Press.
Prestwich, J., 1891. On the age, formation, and successive Drift Stages of the
Geological Society of London. 47: 126–63.
Warren S.H., 1905. On the origin of “Eolithic” Flints by Natural Causes. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 35, 337–364
Uglow, J., 2014. In These Times, Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815. Faber & Faber. London
