THE EXCAVATION OF KENT’S CAVERN, ENGLAND, RECONSTRUCTED

Kent’s Cavern, on the southwest coast of Great Britain, occupies a preeminent role in the history of modern archaeology, in the history of cave science, in the history of the profoundly important 19th Century debate on the antiquity of the human species, and in the paleontological reconstruction of Britain’s faunal history. Although research in the cave has continued sporadically for 200 years, the most important work was conducted by William Pengelly during a 16 year campaign funded by the British Academy for the Advancement of Science. Although this work yielded tens of thousands of specimens from the mid-Pleistocene to the Holocene, and accumulated an unparalleled resource for continued study, the utility of the resource has been constrained by the lack of plans and diagrams of the excavations. Fortunately, the original manuscript notes of the excavations have survived in their entirety, and are of particular interest because they detail the development of a novel and rigorous grid-and-stratum excavation protocol, - employing “Series”, “Parallels” and “Levels” - that was the basis for all modern archeological and paleontological excavations.

Since the exact position of Pengelly’s initial excavation datum was slightly ambiguous, we used a laser rangefinder and sighting compass to match the manuscript description to the modern cave. From this “Series 1”, all subsequent series and their parallels were plotted using the datum origins and shifts recorded in Pengelly’s diaries. We used a modified version of a modern survey of Kent’s Cavern, completed in 1989 with a traverse misclosure error of ~ 0.5%, and overlaid the Pengelly excavation plot, identifying a number of significant errors. The locations of these errors where examined in the cave, and conservative corrections were made to the Pengelly plot to achieve the best fit with the modern survey. Pengelly’s apparent errors resulted from (a) occasional misplacement of the origin (“Parallel”) of a datum shift, (b) occasional omission of a datum shift from the manuscript record, and (c) most commonly, a cumulative error in establishing offset datums at 90° to their origin. The corrected map is available in digital form for future workers.