Creswell Crags

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CONTENTS

• Summary
• Site and Location
• History
• Rock Art
• Dating
• Mobiliary Art
• Artifacts
• Collections
• References

Summary

Creswell Crags is a collection of small paleolithic caves along both sides of a small gorge in the English Midlands.

It made headlines in 2003 when archaeologists discovered paleolithic art in one of the caves - the first ever discovery of British rock art from the old Stone Age.

This was the most important find of Stone Age culture since the 1993 discovery of 500,000 year old hominin remains at Boxgrove, and ranks as the most northerly parietal art in Europe, narrowly beating the reindeer drawing recently found in the Cathole Cave in south Wales.

It's important because it extends the distribution of paleolithic parietal art 450 kilometres further north from Gouy Cave in Normandy, which was formerly the northernmost decorated cave in Europe.

The discovery is likely to trigger additional investigations at caves in Germany and Scandinavia.

At the same time, evidence found in the cave deposits at Creswell Crags shines important light on how prehistoric people survived at the edge of the ice sheet during the Last Ice Age.

In 2012, Creswell Crags was added to the United Kingdom's 'tentative list', for consideration by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Site and Location

The name Creswell Crags refers to an enclosed limestone gorge on the border between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, England, situated near the villages of Creswell and Whitwell.

The 500-metre gorge was carved out of the limestone by a small river, and its floor is currently occupied by a large lake. The four main caves in the gorge are:

• Church Hole Cave
  This is a large cave with side chambers at its entrance, while the main passage continues straight into the hillside. It occupies a fine south-facing position, allowing sunlight to stream into the cave.
• Pin Hole Cave
  A large cave with a small chamber at the rear. Its name derives from the 19th century practice of dropping pins into a small pool in the cave, for good luck.
• Robin Hood's Cave
  Home of the famous Robin Hood Cave Horse, previously known as the Ochre Horse. The site's oldest stone tools were found in this cave. The cave consists of two chambers, which lead to several smaller chambers and galleries.
• Mother Grundy's Parlour
  Located at the eastern end of the gorge. It consists of a single chamber, roughly 11 metres deep by 7 metres wide. It has yielded a quantity of faunal remains along with an assemblage of flint tools.

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History

Creswell Crags provided summer shelter for Stone Age hunter-gatherers tracking herds of reindeer, bison, mammoths and horses, during a crucial period of human evolution.

• The first arrivals were Neanderthals who occupied Robin Hood Cave seasonally between 130,000 and 40,000 BC. They made Mousterian stone tools like hand axes and scrapers out of flint, quartzite and ironstone. The oldest dated artifacts on the site are Neanderthal stone tools, found at Robin Hood's Cave, which date to 43,000 BC.
• Next came Cro-Magnons, the first of the modern humans to arrive in Europe, who arrived about 30,000 BC. They, too, used the cave as seasonal hunters until about 20,000 BC, and left behind a considerable assemblage of advanced flints as well as shaped bone and antler tools.
• The third and final occupation also involved Homo sapiens, who occupied the caves during the last phase of the Paleolithic and into the Mesolithic (c.6,000 BC). They left behind fine shaped flint tools, known as Creswell Points, as well as several fragments of decorated bone that included figurative and abstract imagery.

Rock Art

In April 2003, a number of rock engravings were discovered by Paul Bahn, Sergio Rippoll and Paul Pettitt, on the walls and ceilings of Church Hole Cave.

• The engravings included an animal figure (identified first as an ibex but later as a stag) and two birds.
• Later finds of rock art included carved images of bison, reindeer and horses, including a number of bas-reliefs - in particular, a beautiful and unique depiction of a bird's-head with a long curved bill.
• Interestingly, not only did the prehistoric engravers make use of the natural contours of the cave surface in their carvings, but also they used the sunlight entering the caves, to illuminate their art.
• Although some petroglyphs have been found inside Pin Hole Cave, most of the rock art at Creswell is located inside Church Hole Cave, which is the most decorated shelter in the complex, containing upwards of 80 engravings on at least 12 panels.
• Subjects include: bison, reindeer, horses, a stag, cranes, geese and other unidentified birds.
• In addition, there are a number of abstract signs and symbols, including triangles and oval signs, as well as numerous linear signs set at different angles.

Dating

Engravings are notoriously difficult to date directly, as engravers leave nothing behind.

Luckily, thin layers of calcium carbonate flowstone were covering some of the engravings, allowing researchers to use uranium-thorium analysis.

This is one of the new dating methods used in archaeology, which calculates the date of the flowstone by comparing its relative content of two different isotopes of uranium.

Analysis indicated that the oldest of these flowstones formed at least 10,800 years ago. This gave a minimum age for the engravings which lay underneath.

The archaeologists eventually concluded the engravings had likely been created during the late glacial interstadial occupation of the cave, around 12,000 BC.

That said, some archaeologists have been sceptical about the antiquity of Creswell's cave art.

Following the initial discovery of the paleolithic engraving, the eminent New York paleoarchaeologist Randall White recommended that better documentation was needed to support Creswell's claims.

In addition, the famous French prehistorian Jean Clottes, recommended "an in-depth geological and morphological study of the cave walls", before anyone could be sure of the engraving's antiquity.

These experts were simply reflecting the natural scepticism of those who assumed that the cold climate of Britain - so close to the edge of the ice sheet - was not conducive to a tradition of Upper Paleolithic art in caves.

Presumably, now that uranianium-thorium dating has established a firm minimum date of 12,000 BC, such doubts have been removed.

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Mobiliary Art

Mobiliary art (portable works, like engraved bones or figurines) is more common than parietal art (imagery painted or engraved on the walls of a cave).

In fact, Creswell Crags' significance has been greatly enhanced over the years by the discovery of portable art made of engraved bone – previously the UK's only known figurative art of the paleolithic.

One of the reasons why Bahn, Rippoll and Pettitt decided to examine Creswell Crags for cave art, was because items of portable art dating to 10,000 BC had been found there during earlier excavations. Examples of these items include:

• Robin Hood Cave Horse (previously known as the Ochre Horse) - a 7cm engraving of a horse, drawn on a fragment of rib, which was found in the Robin Hood Cave, by Reverend J.M. Mello, in June 1876. It is indirectly dated to between 9,000 and 11,000 BC.
• Pin Hole Man - an engraving of a male figure with an animal head or mask, drawn on a rib bone of a woolly rhinoceros, which was found in Pin Hole Cave by archaeologist Leslie Armstrong, on Easter Sunday 1926. It is indirectly dated to about 10,000 BC.
• Other items of worked bone found at Creswell include engravings of several different types of animals, including bears, hyenas and hippopotami.

Artifacts

The caves at Creswell have yielded thousands of stone tools and bone implements from the Mousterian and Aurignacian cultures, as well as early Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures.

There is also a quantity of Maglemosian tools, made during the Mesolithic era.

Creswell Crags has also given its name to the 'Creswellian tool culture'.

Diagnostic tools used to identify this culture, include trapezoidal backed blades called Cheddar points - as well as variations known as Creswell points - and smaller bladelets.

Other typical tool types include end scrapers fashioned from long, straight blades.

Some of the Creswellian tools bear a strong resemblance to those found at Kent's Cavern, in Devon, and may have been made by the same group.

Collections

The British Museum holds a number of artifacts and fossils from Creswell Crags, as does the Manchester Museum (University of Manchester) which holds the largest collection of Creswell Crags material, amounting to around 15,000 items.

Museums in Derby and Middlesbrough also have small collections of material from the site.

References

(1) Bahn, P. and Pettit, P., 2009, Britain's Oldest Art: The Ice Age Cave Art of Creswell Crags, London: English Heritage, ISBN 1-848-0202-52, ISBN 978-1848-0202-52.
(2) Dawkins, W.B.; Mello, J.M. (1879). "Further discoveries in the Cresswell Crags". Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. 35 (1–4): 724–735.
(3) Pettit, Paul; White, Mark (2012). The British Palaeolithic: Human Societies at the Edge of the Pleistocene World. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. p. 440. ISBN 978-0-415-67455-3.
(4) A. W. G. Pike, M. Gilmour, P. Pettitt, R. Jacobi, S. Ripoll, P. Bahn and F. Muñoz (2005) "Verification of the age of the Palaeolithic rock art at Creswell," Journal of Archaeological Science 32, 1649–1655.