Palaeolithic artefacts have been known from the deposits beneath Foxhall Road in Ipswich since 1900. The site, which is also known as Valley Brickyard or Derby Road, is in a large brickearth pit on the south side of the road and has yielded a large collection of lithic artefacts. The site was meticulously excavated by Layard from 1903-1905 and produced a primary context handaxe assemblage (Layard 1904, 1906). The archaeology is now thought to occur in clay or on gravel at the edge of a basin cut into Anglian till and glaciofluvial gravels (White & Plunkett 2005). This reinterpretation of Layard’s work, together with recent fieldwork (White and Allen, pers. comm.) suggests that the clay probably represents the infilling of an over-deepened pool within a fluvial system. The only fauna that has been recovered are extremely fragmented bones of large ungulates.

Artefacts from the Layard excavations as reported by White & Plunkett (2004)... [read more]