La Cotte de St Brelade: Urgent Rescue and Stabilisation Project

La Cotte de St Brelade is a collapsed cave system on the island of Jersey. Currently comprising Ice Age deposits preserved within 40m deep ravines on an exposed headland, it represents the most important Neanderthal locality in North Western Europe. Its importance derives from a number of factors but these include: its deep sequence of stratification spanning in excess of 250,000 years, the dense concentration of Neanderthal archaeology, the preservation of Neanderthal human remains and its extensive environmental record. No site in the region offers the opportunity to examine the development of Neanderthal behaviour over such a long time scale and against such a high resolution record of global climate and local environmental change.

The site has a long history of research spanning over a century of investigation by a number of researchers. The most recent sustained excavations were carried out by Professor Charles McBurney (Cambridge University) between 1960 and 1978; during these seasons high resolution datasets of dense occupation activity were recovered from the sequence. These included over 100,000 lithic artefacts and collections of mega-fauna bones from two discrete 'bone-heap' layers. These have formed an important part of discussions of Neanderthal hunting behaviour since their publication in the 1980s.

Investigations were last carried out at the site in 1982 and the sections from the McBurney excavations were concreted over to protect this part of the site. Since then the site has remained uninvestigated and effectively unmonitored; no work, remedial preservation, or active management has been carried out.

In 2010 the Quaternary Archaeology and Environments of Jersey Project was initiated to assess La Cotte and other sites on the island. During the past two seasons our team have identified intact areas of archaeological sediment at La Cotte outside of the concreted area. In 2011 a 4m section of deposit was identified in the western part of the site; this contained finely stratified archaeology preserved within sediments likely to preserve evidence of past environments. These layers form part of a deep geological sequence that has only recently become exposed, as it was previously overlain by discarded spoil from earlier excavations. Recent severe winters had removed this spoil, and exposed the archaeological horizons underneath; these were observed to be completely exposed, saturated and undergoing rapid erosion. Cracks observed within the deposits suggest imminent catastrophic collapse is extremely likely.

The La Cotte de St Brelade Urgent Stabilisation project has been developed as a rapid response to excavate, sample and stabilise this critical exposed section. It aims to achieve this through a targeted intervention which will ensure both the capture of high-resolution datasets from the exposed layers, grading these back to form a stable slope which will remain intact until a long-term management plan can be implemented. The section in question offers extremely high potential for significant archaeology and environmental evidence, and has already been demonstrated to be exceptionally rich, producing high quantities of mint-condition lithics, as well as bone fragments within organic deposits capable of preserving pollen and plant remains. The threatened deposits appear to have been laid down within the Last Glacial period (110-10 000 BP), have never previously investigated using modern scientific techniques, and produced Neanderthal fossils in the early 20th century.

The internationally significant scientific resource needs to be saved from on-going, rapid destruction before cold and wetter conditions set in this winter. The rapid response set out in this project will not only prevent the loss of evidence from this part of the site, but will provide new high-resolution datasets which will tell us more about the behaviour and palaeoecology of the last Neanderthals in Northern Europ

The La Cotte de St Brelade Urgency and Stabilisation Project forms a necessary, responsive stage to an established project (Quaternary Archaeology and Environments of Jersey). The QAEJ team have been successful during the past 3 years in engaging key non-academic stakeholders and the media in our work. We see the most crucial impact outcome of the urgency phase as being the formation of a medium to long term management plan for the site to ensure that the site is properly managed, protected and researched in the future.

We have identified the Société Jersiaise (site owners), Jersey Heritage and the States of Jersey Planning Department as the three key stakeholders on the island. We have already begun to form, in partnership with these bodies, the La Cotte de St Brelade Working Group to develop a management plan for site. The results of the urgency project will not only directly feed into this process but will crucially form a high-profile impetus towards accelerating the formation and implementation of the management plan.

The Working Group will directly benefit from the project in terms of developing a better understanding of the importance of the scientific resource at the site (overall significance), risks to the resource and approaches toward mitigating these risks. We will report to the Working Group on these issues at regular intervals throughout and after the urgency phase of work.

The wider public are identified as an important beneficiary, not only because La Cotte de St Brelade is a well known and celebrated part of the island's heritage but because we have identified ways in which explaining its archaeology can engage the public in aspects of human evolution, responses to climate change and island ecology through a dynamic and compelling long term record of human activity. More constructively wider public engagement can be used to develop momentum on the formation of long term management plans and to demonstrate the utility of the world-class scientific resource at La Cotte in terms of potential commercial value (tourism) and international profile (scientific/heritage prestige).

Wider public engagement will be facilitated through media coverage, public interpretation and web access. The project has already attracted considerable media interest, being regularly covered by both the BBC and local Jersey media through 2010 and 2011. BBC coverage this summer on Radio 4's 'Tribes of Science' and BBC1's 'Digging For Britain' has widened our profile, and that of science-based archaeology, further. We will continue to engage the media in our work as the urgency work is undertaken. The information gathered during the project will provide an opportunity to showcase both the remaining archaeological potential of the site and modern scientific archaeological techniques. By feeding results directly to Jersey Heritage, they will be effectively placed to arrange both a public presentation of our work and integration of results into existing museum displays. The medium term possibility of La Cotte forming part of an exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London will also provide an exceptional means of wider dissemination. Access to results from the work will also be made available through UCL, QAEJ, Société Jersiaise and Jersey Heritage web sites.