The Story of La Cotte

At La Cotte de St Brelade (La Cotte) in Jersey, appearances are deceptive. It looks to be a rocky, steep outcrop with its broad feet planted in the sea. But, through a fissure in the rock face, archaeologists found a time capsule, a paleolithic (or early Stone Age) site that contains 250,000 years of evidence of human life in Jersey. Because of the shape of the rock, deposits and sediment were protected, leaving great stratigraphy (layers of geological material) behind for archaeologists to discover.

Although the name La Cotte means ‘the cave’ the site is actually a ravine – a deep steep-sided valley which cuts right through the granite headland at Ouaisné, St Brelade. The ravine was filled with deposits 40 metres thick that built up over a quarter of a million years. Excavation of these different layers produced over 200,000 stone tools including remains of Jersey’s first people – Neanderthal hunters-gatherers. The layers of La Cotte provide us with valuable information about the changing Ice Age environment and Jersey’s earliest people; how they lived, the tools they made, and how they used the natural landscape to help them hunt animals for food.

Olga Finch, Jersey Heritage’s Curator of Archaeology, looks after the evidence found at La Cotte. Access to La Cotte is hard for professionals, impossible for the general public. You have to abseil down into the space under controlled conditions, which is expensive and difficult. So, we rely on archaeologists’ interpretation of the evidence found to trigger our imaginations, to tell us how we lived. As Olga says, each of the layers in the cave give archaeologists a different snapshot of history: ‘Some of the layers will have evidence of their (Neanderthals) lives – their tools, the animals that they hunted. Then there’ll be other layers from times when Jersey wouldn’t have been inhabited but you’ll get environmental information in those layers. And then there are times when there were animals, but no people.’

La Cotte is one of the oldest archaeological sites on Jersey. Sea levels have risen and dropped several times over the course of millennia. A drop in sea level of 11 metres was enough to join Jersey to France, and the Island became a rocky outcrop in the middle of a vast coastal plain left by the retreat of the sea. Now people could walk across from France following herds of animals as they migrated. Stone tools were found at La Cotte as far back as 1881, which led to a series of formal excavations of the site over the following centuries. The earliest modern, scientific approach to examining the site came with a group of Cambridge archaeologists who excavated for a number of years in the 1960s and 70s (and who were joined, at one point, by Prince Charles). They found evidence of mammals – a pile of bones and teeth belonging to nine woolly mammoths and a woolly rhinoceros.

And for ten years now, a team of archaeologists – the Ice Age Island team led by Dr Matt Pope (UCL Institute of Archaeology) and Dr Beccy Scott (The British Museum) – have been coming and going from La Cotte and other prehistoric sites on Jersey. The site has now been made stable to allow extensive new work to go ahead safely and in the summer of 2022 the team returned and will be working on the site for the next three years. As Olga says, the idea is to stay one step ahead of sea erosion, to examine the archaeology before ‘the sea washes it away.’

La Cotte has provided exceptional early fossil evidence for Neanderthal people on Jersey, as Olga explains: ‘It was a strategically important spot for them, they could watch out for woolly mammoths and rhinoceros, and shelter from cold arctic winds. La Cotte really brings alive just how sophisticated and how organized they were and what great communicators – rather than people’s ideas of their being just grunting cavemen.’ We also now have records of Neanderthal’s use of fire, and heaps of bone which showed how they would work together to hunt their food. on. Nothing of an animal was wasted, hunters could make needles, awls and spear tips from animal bones. The sinews, gut and tendons were used to bind stone tools to wooden hafts. The stomach became a useful bag for carrying blood or water. The fat may have been used to waterproof skin boots and other clothing. Grease may have been smeared over the skin to insulate against the cold or to protect the skin from biting insects. Lamps made of fat may have been used within the caves. Horse hair, which has strong fibres, could be twisted together to make thread for sewing clothes or stringing beads and pendants. Animal skins were used to make bags and rucksacks as well as clothes, shoes, sleeping bags and tents. And although part of their diet was made up of the plants, nuts, fruits, berries, birds’ eggs and snails that could be gathered easily, analysis of Neanderthal bones has shown extremely high levels of carbon and nitrogen, suggesting that up to 85% of their diet was meat-based.

‘Although there are other sites on Jersey where ice age objects have been found, La Cotte is of international significance because of the quality and the quantity of material found there, and because of the long unbroken 250,000 year sequence offered by the site.’ There are two Neanderthal teeth in our collection at Jersey Heritage, found in 1910. They were thought at the time to be from one individual. But recent research by the Natural History Museum in London has revealed exciting dental developments that those early archaeologists could not have found. ‘They have told us that there are two individuals, probably male. But most importantly that the teeth show some elements that look like modern human teeth, which wouldn’t normally be found in a Neanderthal tooth. This suggests there was interbreeding between Neanderthal’s and the first early humans, which we had suspected but had no evidence for.’

The particular geography of La Cotte offered shelter at times when much of the channel sea bed was dry land and exposed to dust-laden winds from the barren lands near the ice sheets. This attracted humans and resulted in dense archaeological layers, full of history for those who know where and how to look for it. As archaeological findings at La Cotte are still being discovered and researched, who knows what we might learn about our early ancestors from the next excavation?