Hoxne Brick Pit is a geological

Site of Special Scientific Interest A Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in Great Britain or an Area of Special Scientific Interest (ASSI) in the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland is a conservation designation denoting a protected area in the United Kingdom and Isle of ...

Hoxne Hoxne ( ) is a village in the Mid Suffolk district of Suffolk, England, about five miles (8 km) east-southeast of Diss, Norfolk and south of the River Waveney. The parish is irregularly shaped, covering the villages of Hoxne, Cross Street a ...

Suffolk Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...

, England. It is a

Geological Conservation Review The Geological Conservation Review (GCR) is produced by the UK's Joint Nature Conservation Committee and is designed to identify those sites of national and international importance needed to show all the key scientific elements of the geological a ...

site. In 1797,

John Frere John Frere (10 August 1740 – 12 July 1807) was an English antiquary and a pioneering discoverer of Old Stone Age or Lower Palaeolithic tools in association with large extinct animals at Hoxne, Suffolk in 1797. Life Frere was born in Royd ...

found flint

hand axe A hand axe (or handaxe or Acheulean hand axe) is a prehistoric stone tool with two faces that is the longest-used tool in human history, yet there is no academic consensus on what they were used for. It is made from stone, usually flint or che ...

s, now known to date back 400,000 years, in a deposit twelve feet deep, and commented that "the situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed; even beyond that of the present world". This is the earliest recognition that hand axes were made by early humans, and was over sixty years before the antiquity of humanity was widely appreciated. One of Frere's hand axes, which was probably a general cutting tool, is held in the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

. The site also provides the type deposits of the

Hoxnian Stage __NOTOC__ The Hoxnian Stage was a middle Pleistocene stage (Pleistocene from million to 11,700 years BP) of the geological history of the British Isles. It was an interglacial which preceded the Wolstonian Stage and followed the Anglian Stage. I ...

, an

interglacial An interglacial period (or alternatively interglacial, interglaciation) is a geological interval of warmer global average temperature lasting thousands of years that separates consecutive glacial periods within an ice age. The current Holocene in ...

between around 474,000 and 374,000 years ago, which is named after the site. The site is on private land with no public access. It has been filled in and there is a house on part of it.

References

{{SSSIs Suffolk Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Suffolk Geological Conservation Review sites Hoxne