21 October 2025
In October we welcomed back the archaeologist Mathew Morris, whose subject was “From Hunters to Farmers: The Story of Stone Age Leicestershire and Rutland”. Major commercial developments must now be preceded by an archaeological survey, which has led to large areas of the counties being explored for the first time and has resulted in nationally significant discoveries about the prehistoric period.
The first evidence of human activity in our area consists of simple hand-axes found alongside the bones and tusks of elephants, deep in the 500,000-year-old gravel deposits at Brooksby Quarry. At that time, before the local landscape was remodelled in the Ice Age, the Bytham River flowed east through the area and our ancestor Homo heidelbergensis perhaps followed the animals along its course.
Soon afterwards, the advancing ice made all of Britain uninhabitable for many millennia. A flint spearhead from Glaston dates from one of the warmer spells and was probably left by a Neanderthal but no permanent occupation was possible until about 12,500 BC. By then, the seasonal growth of the tundra provided rich resources for large herds of animals and the Homo sapiens who hunted them. These people are mostly known from finds in caves but Bradgate Park has a rare open-air site, where nearly 5000 flint artefacts – spear tips, points and scrapers – have been excavated from a natural platform overlooking the end of the “Little Matlock” gorge. The English Channel did not yet exist and the people might have followed the animals’ migration as far east as Moscow every year.
As the climate continued to warm, the landscape became woodland, which was still rich in resources such as deer and pigs but had to be exploited in a different way. In this Middle Stone Age (“Mesolithic”) period, people lived in smaller family groups and travelled less far. Because they regularly returned to the same sites, it became worthwhile to build huts and to create clearings, where they might have encouraged the growth of local food plants like hazel and bramble. Though we now find the first flint woodworking tools, spear tips were made less carefully than before – perhaps because it was so easy to lose them in the undergrowth!
Farming began in the Middle East and spread to Britain – now an island – by about 4,000 BC. This marked the start of the New Stone Age (“Neolithic”) period. The cultivation of grain required permanent settlements and the clearance of land around them. It also allowed the development of pottery, the domestication of animals and the emergence of local cultural differences. The counties’ earliest artwork is a stylized face etched into a sandstone “plaque” found at Rothley Lodge. In fact, the area surrounding the confluence of the Rivers Soar, Wreake and the Rothley Brook is full of pits, post-holes and circular ditches, which mark the sites of domestic dwellings and burials. There will be much more to learn when all the recent excavations in the area have been analysed.