Archaeologists from the UK working in the Channel Island of Jersey have found the remains of a 14,000 year old hunter-gather settlement offering great views over landscapes now drowned by the English Channel.

The site, called Les Varines, is located in the Jersey parish of St Saviour and has produced over 5,000 scattered stone artefacts during the past five years of excavation. But the team has unearthed denser concentrations of tools and burnt bone and, for the first time, fragments of engraved stone. These are currently under study in an attempt to unravel the significance of these unique finds.

Dr Chantal Conneller, a Co-Director of the project from The University of Manchester, said “We knew from the beginning that Les Varines was an important site. There is nothing of its size or scale elsewhere in the British Isles but there are parallels in France and Germany. Previously we had recovered stone artefacts disturbed by later mud flows, but now it seems we have found the well preserved edges of the settlement itself. Incised stones can be common on Magdalenian camps, many are known from sites in the Germany and the south of France, where they are often seen to have a magical or religious use. However they are rare in Northern France and the British Isles, making this a significant find. Although we are not yet sure of the exact age of the campsite, it might well represent some of the first hunter-gather communities to recolonise the north of Europe after coldest period of the last Ice Age”.

The work was carried out by a team from The University of Manchester and University College London.

Dr Ed Blinkhorn, of UCL Institute of Archaeology, who led the excavations, said “This has been the culmination of five years of patient work, tracing thousands of flint tools within slope deposits back to the mother lode. We knew a significant hunter-gatherer camp lay in this field and it seems we’ve finally found it.”