Axe handles dredged from North Sea win archaeology award
Prehistoric hand axes discovered in sand and gravel dredged from the North Sea by Hanson Aggregates Marine have won the Best Archaeological Discovery Award at the prestigious British Archaeology Awards.
Twenty eight flint hand axes, which may be more than 100,000 years old, were discovered in marine sand and gravel delivered by Hanson to a Dutch wharf at Flushing, south west Netherlands in February this year. Dutch amateur archaeologist, who regularly searches for mammoth bones and fossils in material on the wharf, stumbled upon what has been described as one of the most important finds discovered in English waters. The axes show that deep in the Ice Age, mammoth hunters roamed across land that is now submerged beneath the sea. These are the first hand axes that experts are certain come from offshore in English waters, although there have been several finds on the beach, for example at Pakefield in Suffolk.
The hand axes date to the Palaeolithic (or Old Stone Age) but exactly when in that 750,000 year time span is yet to be determined. While the hand axes were discovered in Holland, the gravel came from a licensed marine dredging area in English waters known as Area 240, some 13km off Great Yarmouth lying in water depths of about 25m.
