Excavations
at the Lea Quarry- Page 2 of 3DENHAM, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
The oldest object found at the quarry was a mammoth tusk. It was dug out of the gravels around 6 metres below ground level. Analysis has shown that it belonged to an adult male mammoth which lived during the Middle Devensian period (60-25,000 years ago), a relatively warm part of the last Ice Age when mammoths, woolly rhinos, horses and humans returned to Britain after a lengthy absence.
During the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods (10,000 BC to 4000 BC), visitors to the site left flint artefacts including cutting blades, leaf-shaped arrowheads and flint flakes left over from making tools. In the early to middle Bronze Age (2400 BC to 1500 BC), a circular ditch was excavated. This may have enclosed a burial mound, forming a round barrow, a monument highly characteristic of this period. Close to this, a pottery vessel of the same date was found, containing cremated human remains.
In the Late Bronze Age (1100 BC to 700 BC ), soon after the building of the burial mound, the site was divided into a series of rectangular fields reached by a network of trackways. Within one of these fields lay the remains of a small circular house with a central hearth, which may have belonged to a family of these Bronze Age farmers.
