Things Ain't Always What They Seem to be: a Cautionary Tale Concerning a ‘Hand-axe’

In June 2007 David Summers was digging in his garden at Wroughton (NGR SU 14778117), just south of Swindon, Wiltshire, when he noticed a small bifacial flint tool. Realising that it was something interesting he e-mailed photographs to Devizes Museum where the now-retired curator, Paul Robinson, identified it as a Lower Palaeolithic hand-axe. The implement is a small pointed bifacial tool, conforming exactly to Wymer's (1968) type F hand-axes; it measures 60 mm long, 47 mm wide and is 29 mm thick. The object is unrolled, suggesting that it had not moved far from the point where it was dropped, but is heavily stained. Nothing like it was known from the immediate area although hand-axes have been recorded from the summit of Hackpen Hill, 7 km to the south (Roe 1968) with others, including small implements, from one of the most prolific sites in Britain at Knowle Farm (Roe 1968) on the edge of Savernake Forest. It was suggested that the present author might be interested in the axe and could perhaps tell him more about it. Some digital photographs were duly received and confirmed, with a caveat that the comment was being made from photos, that the object did, indeed, appear to be a small hand-axe. It was added to the County Sites and Monuments Record (SMR) and was also taken to the British Museum, where it was confirmed as a hand-axe. Nick Ashton, Curator of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Collections, also commenting from photographs, considered that it certainly looked like a hand-axe but contributed that the back garden provenance was unusual and suggested that it may have been originally found elsewhere.