Late Mesolithic human remains, Tilbury Docks, Tilbury (EHER 1721)

Late Mesolithic human remains were found in 1883, during the construction of the docks at Tilbury. The skeleton comes from a depth of nearly 10m, in the uppermost of 0.5m of a sand layer, underlying an alternating sequence of peats and estuarine silts and clays. Re-examination of the burial, including AMS radiocarbon dating, now identifies the body as an adult male, with two healed cranial injuries, dating to the Late Mesolithic.

Neolithic or Bronze Age human remains found. <1> Calvaria and body bones. Found in Tilbury Docks, September 1883. <2> <3> in <2> In Natural History Museum. <4> Apparently Thurrock Museum catalogue has numerous references relating to these remains. <5> Dating evidence? No new information from the NRHE data transfer which also records the remains as Neolithic or Bronze Age. <5> The inhumation is really an old discovery of a partial skeleton from 1883, that was found during the construction of the new docks at Tilbury. The skeleton comes from a depth of nearly 10m, in the uppermost of 0.5m of a sand layer, underlying an alternating sequence of peats and estuarine silts and clays. Re-examination of the burial by Rick Schulting, University of Oxford, including AMS radiocarbon dating now identifies the body as an adult male, with two healed cranial injuries, dating to the Late Mesolithic, 6065-5912 cal BC. Schulting thinks that the burial was probably an intentional burial, as the small bones of the hands and feet which were present indicating that the body had been buried intact, as these are the body parts most easily lost during decomposition. There was no record of any grave offerings being found with the burial, although the circumstance of its discovery was not conducive to the recovery of very small items. <6> <7> notes that these remains were initially described as Palaeolithic by the late Sir Richard Owen <8>, but that 'the deposit in which the remains were found was, however, not of the age assumed by Sir Richard Owen, and the human bones, though undoubtedly very old, are not of Palaeolithic age'.