Studies in Speleology

Volume 17 2010

William Pengelly Cave Studies Trust Ltd.

ISSN 0585-718X 13 BOOK REVIEW

Kents Cavern: A field guide to the natural history Joyce Lundberg and Donald A McFarlane, 2008. William Pengelly Cave Studies Trust 44pp; numerous colour photographs, maps & diagrams ISBN-13 978-0-9559514-0-4

It was not so much what William Pengelly found when he excavated Kents Cavern, though that was remark- able enough. It was the methods that he developed and used for the conduct of the work and in the recording of what was found that continue to make his work relevant and important. His interpretations of the deposits in that cave, and of those in Brixham Cave, took him in the 1870s and 1880s from being a local celebrity to being a popular national figure but it is his survey and re- cording techniques that have given him the lasting status of a principal figure in the development of mod- ern archaeological methods.

Having moved from Cornwall to Torquay as a young man, Pengelly quickly became inter- ested in the contemporary debate about the ‗antiquity of Man‘ and in the increasing ten- sions caused by attempts to reconcile the findings from a number of excavations and the biblical account of the Creation. There, in the 1820s in the town where Pengelly was now living, Father John MacEnery from Torre Abbey had already done some excavation in Kents Cavern; he was not the first – people had been exploring the cave since at least the 16th century. However, MacEnery‘s findings, published posthumously, suggested the co- existence of human remains and those of extinct animals and Pengelly realised that a full- scale and tightly managed excavation of the cave was essential. He did some work in the cave himself in the 1840s and then took on the excavation of Brixham Cave in the 1850s, where he developed and refined his excavation techniques (Boylan, 2008a).

By 1865 Pengelly was ready to do a thorough excavation of Kents Cavern, an undertaking that would occupy him and his excavation team for 16 years. In this fieldguide now under review Lundberg and McFarlane describe the geometry of Pengelly‘s excavation methods and quote his own explanation of how the various human and animal remains, artefacts and other findings were recorded and stored:

―Whenever a bone or other article worthy of preservation was found, its situa- tion (that is to say, its distance from the mouth or entrance of the gallery in which it occurred, as well as its depth below the surface of the bed in which it lay) was carefully determined by actual measurement. In order to [facilitate] their identification, the specimens were all numbered; those that were found in the same place received the same numeral, and were packed in one and the same box, so that at the close of exploration the number of boxes indicated the number of localities in which fossils had been found; the boxes were distin- guished by numbers, each bearing that which each specimen within it bore. Studies in Speleology Volume 17, August 2010 14 JOHN WILMUT Finally an entry of each box was made in a journal, in which were registered the number and situation of the specimens it contained, with the date on which they were found, and occasionally a few remarks respecting them.‖ (Pengelly et al. 1873: 482).

We are now reaping the full benefits of Pengelly‘s diligence. We are seeing a series of scientific papers that are re-visiting Pengelly‘s work, subjecting his data to modern inter- pretations and the specimens that he found (and which are now spread over a number of museums) to new techniques of analysis. The remarkable thing is that the data is robust enough to withstand this intensive treatment and Pengelly would surely be fascinated and excited to discover that we can now identify in some detail almost a half million year se- quence of deposits in Kents Cavern (Boylan, 2008b).

But if you go to the cave and join the tourist trail it is very difficult to identify the features that were of so much interest to Pengelly and that are exciting today‘s researchers. There isn‘t enough time to look around properly, you don‘t see some parts of the cave and the guides‘ patter (though of better quality than you get in many show caves) doesn‘t explain the whole known history of the site, dwelling rather on a few of the more spectacular high- lights. Moreover, Pengelly‘s excavation didn‘t leave an awful lot to see and the conversion to a show cave has obscured some of what was left. This is where this excellent field guide comes in.

It is in two sections. The first part introduces the cave and explains in detail how it was formed and how it has developed. Pengelly‘s methods and findings are discussed and the cave is placed in the context of the climatic changes of the last half-million years. There are ample illustrations and photographs, a glossary of terms, and the language of the descrip- tion is accessible to interested non-specialist readers.

The second part of the guide takes you on a tour of the cave stopping at 24 points at each of which features are explained and illustrated and are related to the discussion in the first part of the guide. The explanations are detailed, so that a reader will need quite a lot of time to read the text and observe the features. For this reason, the cave management at Kents is willing to arrange special tours that use this guide, making more time available for these.

However, the guide does provide a huge amount of information and there can be few, if any, small caves that are so extensively documented. To be realistic, if you want to get as much as possible from a cave tour, it would be sensible to buy this guide some time before- hand, become familiar with the first part and have a least some understanding of the tour route and what there is to be seen. It might even be sensible to plan for more than one visit.

The guide was produced as a collaboration between the management of Kents Cavern and the William Pengelly Cave Studies Trust. It is available from the cave shop and from the Trust. Of course, the guide is by no means the end of the Kents Cavern story. It is already out of date as new papers have appeared, reporting further analyses by these authors and others, based on William Pengelly‘s original data. This is, indeed, a rich seam of science, with something to interest everyone.

JOHN WILMUT

Studies in Speleology Volume 17, August 2010 15

BOYLAN, PATRICK J. 2008a. The 1858 discovery and excavation of the Brixham Bone Cave, Devon. Studies in Speleology Vol. 16, p3-15.

BOYLAN, PATRICK J. 2008b. Review Article: New research proves there is a near-continuous half million years‘ sequence of deposits in Kent‘s Cavern, Torquay. Studies in Speleology Vol. 16, P53-58.

PENGELLY, W., BUSK, G., EVANS, J., PRESTWICK, J., FALCONER, H., & RAMSAY A. 1873. Report on the exploration of Brixham Cave, conducted by a committee of the Geological Society, and under the superintendence of Wm.Pengelly, Esq., FRS., aided by a local committee; with descriptions of the animal remains by George Busk, Esq., F.R.S., and of the flint implements by John Evans, Esq., F.R.S., Joseph Prestwich, F.R.S., F.G.S., &c., Reporter: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, v. 163, p. 471-572.

Studies in Speleology Volume 17, August 2010