The Collection

The Pin Hole Cave excavations in the 1980s led to the discovery of many amazing artefacts which we have on display in our museum, but Eric is one of our favourites. He is an articulated and almost complete skeleton of a baby hyena, and is always surprising visitors as they enter our museum. Hyenas were a common animal in the Ice Age, and many of the animal bones found on site have gnaw-marks from hungry hyenas.

This flint artefact is a long, thin blade, and may have been used as a knife. Creswell Points are identified through having one long, sharp edge, and a shorter edge which is deliberately blunted to make it softer on the hand. This Creswell Point was found close to a cut-marked hare, and may have been used to butcher the meat and remove the fur.

This oddly-shaped and decorated stone is actually believed to be the playing board for an ancient game known as Nine Men’s Morris. Not quite what you’d expect to find outside Church Hole? Well, it was found alongside various Medieval bottles and coins, suggesting that the cave may have been used as a gambling den in the past. It could even relate to the group of Monks who inhabited nearby Welbeck Abbey.

Our handling collection contains a huge number of replicas and real artefacts which we can show to our visitors up-close. Take a look at this spectacular replica hand-axe, made by John Lord, a professional flint-knapper and demonstrator.

Creswell Crags has been the focus of excavations for centuries, and it’s fascinating to look at how archaeology and archaeologists have changed over time. However, one thing that remains the same is the simple trowel, the most important tool an archaeologist owns. This one belonged to A.L. Armstrong and as you can see it got a lot of wear over the years.

Our staff and volunteers currently care for approximately 75,000 objects within the collection, and occasionally, mistakes are made or information is lost. If you recognise the item below or know anything specific about how it came to Creswell Crags, please let us know!

What we know: This artefact is labelled ‘Rhinoceras tichorhinus pelvis, Pleistocene, Thuringewold, Germany’. It has been found in a box in our collection labelled ‘WR’. It has not been treated with any conservation materials or varnishes.

What we don’t know: How it came to be at Creswell Crags, and whether it belongs to us or we have it on loan from somewhere else.

The sacrum is the central bone of the pelvis, found between the two hip bones. This complete, huge sacrum was found at Halcroft Quarry in 1986 along with a large volume of other fossil remains.

This beautifully crafted handaxe originated in the Azraq Basin of Jordan. It was brought to the collection along with a number of other specimens from across the world, to allow researchers to compare and contrast the tools made in different geographical areas.

This beautifully-coloured flint core is another artefact from Jordan. Flint can come in a whole range of colours, from deep greys to almost perfect whites, and the flint artefacts we have from Jordan include oranges, browns, and this exceptional pink.

These bear remains were purchased at some point in the 1970s or 1980s, and are labelled with beautiful handwriting ‘Cave Bear… Gondenans-Les-Moulins, 1952’. We now think it may be a brown bear rather than a cave-bear, but they are now travelling to Sheffield University where they can be studied further and used as an educational resource.

Here are a selection of tiny pieces of flint, known as ‘debitage’, discovered in a Mesolithic layer of Mother Grundy’s Parlour. Creswell Crags is unique not only for its Palaeolithic remains, but for the later artefacts, including the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Roman and Medieval periods.

This small piece of ochre was discovered outside Church Hole in the summer of 2018. Analysis is still ongoing, but it may be an indication that our rock engravings were richly coloured in the past. Look out on our blog for further updates as we learn more about this discovery.

This is the tooth of the extinct woolly rhinoceros. They inhabited Creswell Crags during the middle of the last glacial period, and disappeared from Britain around 35,000 years ago. Their coat of long hairs and thick wool kept them warm in the cold conditions. However, their short legs made were unsuited for traversing through deep snow. It is thought that increased snowfall may have contributed to the species’ extinct. 

The spotted hyaena inhabited Britain discontinuously from around 700,000 to 34,000 years ago. During this time, they used many caves as dens. When excavating these caves, palaeontologists find evidence of the hyaenas’ life, including the bones of the hyaenas themselves, their coprolites (preserved faeces), and remains of their prey. This partial upper jaw is just one of many hyaena specimens that have been found in the Creswell Crags caves.

These massive teeth from Pin Hole are of a wild horse. Only one subspecies is alive today, living in China and Mongolia. This subspecies’ habitats include open grassland. This is similar to the vegetation of Creswell Crags during part of the last glacial period. The past vegetation is inferred from the environmental tolerances of species that inhabited the Crags, in addition to   pollen from hyaena coprolites (preserved faeces) found in the caves.