Excavations outside Church Hole by a major team lead by staff from the University of Sheffield, The British Museum and the University of Bristol are currently continuing into their third season, running every day between 4th and 15th August 2008. This is the first major excavation at Creswell Crags since the 1920s. The main object of the project is to uncover major finds from the Ice Age, when hyaenas, Neanderthals and late Ice Age hunter-gatherers lived at Creswell Crags. Although all of the deposits originally contained in the gorge's main caves were excavated away between the 1870s and 1930s, hardly any investigations of the deposits outside the caves have occurred in the long history of archaeological and palaeontological work in the gorge. During the 2007 season the team uncovered evidence of use of the gorge during the Ice Age, Neolithic, Late Bronze Age, Iron Age, Romano-British period, and from the Medieval period up to the nineteenth century. As previous research has understandably emphasised the Ice Age archaeology for which the gorge is justly famous, the new excavations are redressing this imbalance by showing that the gorge has been an important place of activity throughout time.
This year the project has been funded by the Enterprise Zone of the University of Sheffield, which as the name implies promotes business in the university curriculum and develops the entrepreneurial spirit. We have a large team of Sheffield undergraduates who, in addition to the demands of excavation, finds processing and recording, are giving public tours of the excavations, producing a number of posters about the project and archaeology of the gorge, and participating in making a film about the gorge and project. They are presented with opportunities to develop their creative thinking and presentation skills and to reflect on what they learn through the project. Jenny Moore and Toni Weddell of the Enterprise Zone are part of the team and come out to lead discussions in these areas.
Creswell Crags grabbed the headlines in 2003 and 2004 when the first and currently only known discoveries of Ice Age rock art in Britain were discovered in Church Hole. It subsequently became clear that the art dated to at least 13,000 years ago. The new excavations are designed to improve our understanding of the use of the cave by the Late Upper Palaeolithic artisits. Dr Paul Pettitt of the Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, the excavation's principle director and the person who lead the rock art discoveries, remarked that 'this is a fantastic opportunity to excavate at such an important site. We know that Church Hole was excavated very rapidly by the Victorians in the 1870s and as a result very little is known about the animals such as hyaenas and the people who inhabited this cave during the Ice Age. Many of the bones and stone tools would have been thrown away and now lie within the Victorian spoil heap directly outside the cave's entrance. Our plan is to excavate this spoil heap and find the original Ice Age sediments below which contain bones and other artefacts from the period.'