John Frere Discovers Prehistoric Tools in England

John Frere Discovers Prehistoric Tools in England

Overview

John Frere (1740-1807) was an English landowner with a modest political career and enough of an interest in archaeology to join the London-based Society of Antiquaries. He discovered a group of chipped-flint objects in a brick-earth quarry near Hoxne in 1790, and described them in a June 1797 letter to the Society as "weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals." What made the tools remarkable, first to Frere and later to others, was that they lay beneath 12 feet (3.66 m) of undisturbed soil and gravel, below (and thus older than) a sand layer containing shells that appeared to be marine and the bones of a large, apparently extinct mammal. Frere concluded that the tools and their unknown makers belonged to a time long before humans were thought to have existed. Frere's interpretation of the stone tools challenged current ideas about of the early history of the human race and set the stage for the evolution of a new understanding over the next 60 years.

Background

Frere's letter to the Society of Antiquaries, read before the society in 1797 and published in the 1800 issue of its journal, was hardly an intellectual bolt from the blue.

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