Some Aspects of the Physiography of the Thames Valley in Relation to the Ice Age and Early Man

Abstract

The physiographic approach to the problems of Pleistocene chronology has often been under-rated and sometimes completely ignored.It will be well to begin this paper with a quite general statement of the basis on which this approach depends. In simplest terms it rests on the fact that the deposits with which we are concerned and to which it is sought to apply the method of palaeontological or archaeological dating were all accumulated on land-surfaces. These surfaces are themselves a proper subject of study by geomorphologists. The deposits are an integral part of the developing surface of the land. Any conclusions concerning their age and origin must be consistent with the general physiographic sequence. Physiographic considerations do not in themselves provide a very close or detailed chronology, but their indications are evidently worthy of consideration in any general purview of the difficult chronological problems concerned. Your ‘geo-chronologist’ needs to be, to this extent, a geomorphologist, as well as a palaeontologist or typologist. River-gravels and glacial ‘Deckenschotter’ mark, in general, old valley-floors and the movement of ice, in part at least, is controlled by the form of the underlying surface, subject to the evident fact that ice can, in some circumstances, move uphill.