Palaeolithic artefacts have been known from the gravels and sands of the Lower Thames area for 300 years. The first hand axe ever recorded was found by J. Conyers in 1690 in gravels beneath Granville Square, Grays Inn (Evans, 1860). The latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries saw a great era of collection and recording of stone implements. This was the period of hand-working and sorting of gravel. Subsequently, the advent of machine operation has seen a decline in artefact discoveries, and indeed of vertebrate remains. It has also seen the exhaustion of artefact-bearing gravel resources.

The Lower Thames Valley is one of the most important areas for Palaeolithic artefacts in the country, a fact that may reflect its importance to Palaeolithic humans. This is because of the abundance of flint, the raw material for implement manufacture. In addition, the Thames has been a substantial river throughout its later history and would have offered an important routeway into the hinterland.

The artefact assemblages of the Thames Valley have been the subject of innumerable studies and important publications. The most famous local collectors included in the nineteenth century Evans, Spurrell and Smith, and in this century Smith, Chandler and Burchell and more recently Wymer and Sieveking. There are three recent synthetic works on the Thames assemblages: the Gazeteer of Lower Palaeolithic sites (Roe, 1968a) and the two important, detailed syntheses by Wymer (1968, 1985), already extensively referred to above.