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...