Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [93]
Sollas then stated (E. Harrison 1928, p. 299): “Granting that it was, however, what does it prove? The patina of the latest chipping is not deep, it looks to my eyes remarkably fresh, and, since palaeolithic implements are found in your deposits, what evidence have you to show that this was not also palaeolithic?” Here the same old question, to which Prestwich long ago had given a detailed and convincing scientific response, came up again. To repeat Prestwich’s basic points, the Eolithic implements, being quite well worn, were distinctly different in appearance from the paleoliths; furthermore, they were sometimes found by themselves in specific deposits. Despite his doubts, Sollas did, however, request more samples for the Oxford museum and Harrison sent six.
At the beginning of the First World War, the British Army, perhaps fearing a German invasion, dug trenches on the hills around Ightham, creating more exposures of gravel for Benjamin Harrison to search. Sir Edward R. Harrison (1928, p. 317) wrote that one of the local flint hunters trained by Benjamin Harrison “joined up at the outbreak of war in 1914, was stationed in the Somme valley, found a palaeolith when digging a trench, carried it with him ‘over the top’, and finally brought it safely to Ightham, and to Harrison, when he came home on leave.”
Harrison died in 1921, and his body was buried on the grounds of the parish church, St. Peter’s, in Ightham. On his gravestone one finds the words: “He found in life, ‘books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything’” (E. Harrison 1928, p. 331). A memorial tablet, set in the north wall of St. Peter’s on July 10, 1926, bears this inscription: “IN MEMORIAM.—Benjamin Harrison of Ightham, 1837–1921, the village grocer and archaeologist whose discoveries of eolithic flint implements around Ightham opened a fruitful field of scientific investigation into the greater antiquity of man. A man of great mind and of kindly disposition” (E. Harrison 1928, p. 332). Factually speaking, however, the “fruitful field of scientific investigation into the greater antiquity of man” opened by the eoliths of the Kent Plateau was buried along with Harrison.
3.3 Discoveries by J. Reid Moir in East Anglia
Our journey of exploration now takes us to the southeast coast of England and the discoveries of J. Reid Moir. Starting in 1909, Moir found flint implements in and beneath the Red and Coralline Crags of East Anglia (Suffolk). We shall first give an overview of Moir’s discoveries and then discuss in detail the scientific controversies they sparked, concluding with a survey of recent opinion.
3.3.1 Moir and Harrison
J. Reid Moir, a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and president of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, was acquainted with Benjamin Harrison’s eoliths. Moir (1927, p. 17) believed the gravels on the Kent Plateau, from which Harrison had recovered his eoliths, were the remnants of an old Tertiary land surface, perhaps as old as the Eocene. But, as we have seen, some authorities would assign the gravels of the Kent Plateau to the Pliocene (Sections 3.2.2,
3.2.4). Moir wrote: “It is probable that these flints were shaped by a race of apelike people who lived on a land surface which existed at one time over what is now the Weald of Kent, which was then enjoying a tropical climate. . . . They were probably small, squat men, with very ape-like skulls and projecting jaws, and in many ways more like animals than men” (1927, pp. 17–18, 19).
Moir was an evolutionist. He believed that the degree of primitiveness shown by a very old stone tool industry was indicative of the correspondingly primitive physiological character of the toolmaker. But even today tribal people, physiologically identical to MIT computer scientists, make implements just like the crudest ever found in ancient strata. Furthermore, skeletal remains of fully human character have been found in strata dating back to the Pliocene