At the headwaters of the English Channel river: considering Late Neanderthal archaeology in the Sussex Weald Matt Pope 1 , Lesley Blundell 1 , Hannah Cutler 2 & Beccy Scott 3 1 Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 31-34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PY, UK. m.pope@ucl.ac.uk 2 Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3DZ, UK. 3 Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory, British Museum, Franks House, 38-56 Orsman Road, London, N1 5QJ, UK. Abstract The Cretaceous landscapes of the Weald, in southern Britain, have been largely bypassed by Palaeolithic research for almost a century. After the betrayal of Piltdown, the moderate interest held in the river gravels of the region waned and the finds from the interfluves were largely restricted to isolated handaxes perceived as offering little research potential. But the results of recent excavations carried out at the site of Beedings in West Sussex, suggest that the potential of Wealden geologies in general and the Lower Greensand in particular should be reconsidered. The excavations revealed local capture points in the form of fissures within bedrock (gulls) preserving Late Middle Palaeolithic (LMP) and Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) material in broad stratigraphic succession at shallow depth and within datable, fine-grained sediments. Encouraged by Roger Jacobi, who suggested to us a wider consideration of Palaeolithic archaeology from the Lower Greensand of Sussex, we present in this paper an overview of isolated finds in the Weald and consider what they might be able to tell us about both processes of artefact preservation and the potential landscape preferences of late Neanderthal populations. More generally we outline a framework in which the data provided by these ‘interfluve’ records can begin to bring areas of the landscape away from the river terraces under closer scrutiny, offering research directions which can begin to address the role Plateau, Interfluve and Escarpment edge (PIE) locations played in Palaeolithic settlement. The paper concludes by proposing a Unified Palaeolithic Landscape Approach, one which integrates the entire landscapes record at a regional scale into a model of past human activity and geomorphological change. We suggest that until a more unified account of the record is attempted and PIE contexts addressed directly by British Palaeolithic research and then integrated with that of similar landscapes on the near continent, we run the risk of developing interpretations of the record which are unhelpfully skewed towards the records of fluvial environments. Introduction Roger Jacobi was possibly the last person to possess a personal overview of the isolated artefacts which make up the wider Palaeolithic record of the Weald; the denuded anticline of Cretaceous geology which straddles Surrey, Kent, and both East and West Sussex. In the course of a lifetime of research, the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeology of the region came under Jacobi’s scrutiny, and he was able to develop an overview of the region’s key find-localities, museum collections and the individual artefacts which comprise this record. To consider the work required for an individual to acquire this knowledge again in the future is daunting enough but, remarkably, Jacobi had this level of knowledge for a large and significant part of the entire British early prehistoric record. His was an understanding of the deep past that grew artefact by artefact, site by site, over the course of an entire working life. Given the nature of modern academic research careers and the problems we see today in gaining access to museum collections, it is unlikely, even with the emergence of another unique individual with talents such as those Jacobi possessed, and augmented by digital technology, that the achievement would be possible today. For now, we are left with his legacy: records, publications and our own personal experience of working alongside him to guide how we take forward research in areas to which he drew attention. We were fortunate enough to benefit from Roger Jacobi’s guidance when our team took on the excavations at the Upper Palaeolithic site of Beedings in West Sussex. The site itself had been assessed by Jacobi in the late 20th century as a highly significant collection of Upper Palaeolithic material, and this interpretation was presented in a key publication on the assemblage (Jacobi 1986). In 2007, through Jacobi’s contribution to the Leverhulme-funded AHOB research programme, his full publication of the Beedings material further emphasised its importance in comprising the largest collection of transitional or Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) artefacts of the Lincombian-Ranisian- Jerzmanovician (LRJ) techno-complex in Europe (Jacobi 2007). While our fieldwork, setting out to determine the original context of these finds, has been published (Pope & Wells 2008; Pope 2009; Pope et al. 2013), in this paper we wish to consider a significant footnote to this field research; the discovery that, in addition to EUP material, a small element of earlier, clearly Middle Palaeolithic artefacts was preserved within the gulls at Beedings (Fig. 2). Discussed alongside other surface finds of Middle Palaeolithic material in Sussex, this paper opens a