ABSTRACT
The Golf Course site at Clacton contains a small heavily disturbed primary context knapping episode, whose flintwork is interspersed with other secondary context artefacts. They both occur in MIS 11, and are associated with a single river, and a particular section of it at that, the Lower Thames Valley. The biological evidence suggests it is unambiguously temperate, and the author see no grounds not to associate it with the artefacts from Early Temperate pollen zone IIb at the West Cliff. Handaxe makers were present in Britain before the Clactonian, and were also (broadly) contemporary with it. It consequently brings the non-handaxe assemblage type of Britain, into line with the non-handaxe assemblages of western Europe, but for which an assemblage type interpretation is not appropriate. The few bifaces the people do find at Clacton and Swanscombe could have been made by hunters returning to the valley after foraging further afield.
