Background

Gough’s Cave is Britain’s most significant later Upper Palaeolithic site with the largest collection of human remains from the British Pleistocene as well as one of the most diverse set of mammalian remains from the Late Glacial. A show cave located in Cheddar Gorge in the Mendip Hills, Gough’s was first excavated by Richard Gough in the last decade of the 19th Century. The cave has yielded one of the largest collections of artefacts and faunal remains of any Upper Palaeolithic cave in Britain. Recent excavations in the 1980s uncovered new material and improved understanding of the cave’s stratigraphy. Most of the fauna comes from a clastic wedge that filled the entrance, most of which dates from about 14,700 years bp. The site appears to have been associated with horse hunting and its fauna was accumulated by people, most of the bones having cut marks and associations with human-worked artefacts. Human remains at the site show signs of contem... [read more]