This volume concerns the HS1 study theme defined as 'Prehistoric Ebbsfleet'. It focuses on landscape development and human occupation from the Palaeolithic through to the Early Iron Age, a span of around 300,000 years. This period incorporates fluctuating extremes of climate between harsh sub-arctic conditions when southern Britain would have been a frozen and uninhabitable treeless waste, and Mediterranean conditions when luxuriant forest was interspersed with grassy plains, rich in what we would now regard as tropical fauna such as lion, hippopotamus and hyaena. A reappraisal of the important Palaeolithic flint artefact collections from Baker's Hole and the Ebbsfleet Channel is also presented.

This volume provides a landscape narrative of early hominin evolution, linking conventional material and geographic aspects of the early archaeological record with wider and more elusive social, cognitive and symbolic landscapes. It seeks to move beyond a limiting notion of early hominin culture and behaviour as dictated solely by the environment to present the early hominin world as the outcome of a dynamic dialogue between the physical environment and its perception and habitation by active agents. This international group of contributors presents theoretically informed yet empirically based perspectives on hominin and human landscapes.