ABSTRACT
This chapter describes in detail the Late Upper Palaeolithic archaeology of Britain. For much of the late Upper Pleistocene Britain was either under ice or experiencing severe periglacial activity with concomitantly little evidence of life. The palaeontological and archaeological record from caves, rockshelters and open air sites from Scotland, Wales and England as far south-west as Devon is patchy, taphonomically sorted, has suffered from the damage caused by early excavation and loss and, in almost all cases, amounts to single findspots or very small assemblages representing little more than brief, ephemeral camp stops. That said, much finer resolution is possible for this period than for any previous era, due to its relative recentness and to the application of major radiocarbon dating projects. It can be seen that it contains a number of temporally discreet assemblage types that are technologically and typologically comparable to contemporary examples on the continent and seems broadly synchronous with continental assemblage change. The British record is, nevertheless, impoverished compared to continental Europe and, despite a relatively high temporal resolution, one is still afforded only partial glimpses of the various behavioural and social themes that run through this book. For much of the period, Britain seems to have been a human desert. The known archaeology could amount to little more than a few years or tens of years of occupation in total.
