Recent excavations at the Valdoe Quarry in West Sussex have provided a new locality for the study of human activity and environment in the Middle Pleistocene. Fieldwork and analysis, funded through the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, were undertaken at the Valdoe Quarry ahead of a renewed and final stage of gravel extraction at the site. Through geological mapping, sedimentary sequences entirely comparable to those at the Boxgrove Quarry, 6 km to the east, were sampled in order to determine their archaeological potential and characterize the associated paleoenvironmental conditions. This paper provides an introduction to this work ahead of detailed publication of the results. Initial results suggest that the site represents a locality within the same contemporary recessional paleolandscape as the main Boxgrove site.

Abstract Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) was one of the leading British geologists, who did much work on the Lower Palaeozoic stratigraphy. He was professor of geology at Cambridge and was an Anglican clergyman, later becoming Prebendary (Canon) of Peterborough. This paper considers his religious beliefs in relation to his geology, which, as he was an evangelical, centres on his and other people's interpretations of Genesis. Although he did not publish anything on Genesis, his understanding becomes clear from three interactions with fellow Anglican clergy. Two were acrimonious, one being with Henry Cole after the publication of The Discourse in 1833, and the other his controversy with Dean Cockburn of York at the British Association meeting in York in 1844. The third was his friendly correspondence with the evangelical Dean of Carlisle, Francis Close. This letter gave the longest statement of his ‘reconciliation’ of geology and Genesis.

Abstract The Protestant understanding of creation in relation to science has been slightly different from that described for the Catholic churches and more diverse, as Protestants emphasize the authority of the Bible and private judgement. The conflict thesis of science and religion is rejected, but there were four skirmishes: over heliocentricity, the rise of geology, evolution and, today, the impact of creationism. The variety of belief among Protestants, and especially Anglicans, is expounded from non-realism, which denies the existence of God, to critical realism, in its liberal and conservative forms, which totally accept modern science, to ‘naive’ realism, which emphasizes the plain, or literal, reading of the Bible and rejects evolution and, often, geological time, and has given rise to ‘creationism’. Representative examples of each are introduced.

Abstract In 1550 few questioned the ‘biblical’ age of the earth, but by the mid-nineteenth century no educated person accepted it. The change is considered to have been a period of conflict between Christianity and science over the age of the earth. In fact, the conflict was small because from the Reformation era most considered the bible to be accommodated to its culture and that at the beginning of time God created a Chaos, which was re-constituted in ‘six days’. This was put forward by Grotius and Mersenne. then by the Theories of the Earth of Burnet. Whiston and others and then by later writers to allow for geological time. This reached its climax in early nineteenth century Britain with Chalmers. Conybeare and Buckland, thus preventing any major conflict between geology and Genesis. The perceived conflict of these centuries is a matter of retrospective interpretation, which does not do justice to those Christian thinkers, like de Luc, Chalmers and Townsend who accommodated geological time with little conflict, and those like Patrick, Ray and Whiston who opened up the way for this accommodation to geological time in the seventeenth century. The conflict between geology and Genesis is one of retrospective perception rather than historical reality. Only a minority of Christians, as with the anti- or scriptural geologists of the early nineteenth century, considered there to be a conflict.

Abstract Jonah field in the northwestern part of the Greater Green River basin produces gas from the Lance Formation of Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) age. The Maastrichtian in the central Rocky Mountain region was a complex period of major transitions associated with the onset of the Laramide orogeny. This period of mountain building and basin development, which ultimately divided the central part of the Rocky Mountain foreland basin into much smaller Laramide basins and uplifts, began during latest Campanian and early Maastrichtian time and continued until near the end of the Eocene. The Maastrichtian section consists largely of continental rocks in the western part of the study area and interbedded continental and nearshore marine rocks in the eastern part. Marine shales deposited in the Maastrichtian seaway are effective seals of regional extent in many parts of the central Rocky Mountain region. Coaly source rocks occur throughout a broad area near the limit of maximum westward marine transgression during the Maastrichtian in this region. Jonah field, however, is located west of the marine shale seals and west of the area with significant Maastrichtian coaly intervals. Coaly intervals in the underlying Campanian Rock Springs Formation at Jonah may be the source of much of the gas, and a shale interval near the top of the Lance Formation may be the top seal for Jonah. An isopach map of Maastrichtian rocks reveals a complex pattern, including thickening trends toward newly developing Laramide uplifts as well as thickening toward areas of active thrusting along the Sevier orogenic belt. Jonah field is located in a deep, northwest-trending trough that developed southwest of the Laramide Wind River Range during the Maastrichtian. The Maastrichtian interval is overlain by lower Paleocene rocks throughout much of the study area, except near later Laramide uplifts. These thickening trends are the result of both variations in rates of subsidence during the Maastrichtian and differential erosion of Maastrichtian rocks prior to deposition of overlying Paleocene rocks. The Maastrichtian section is thin throughout a broad area in the southwestern part of the Greater Green River basin and Uinta basin. The lack of active thrusting and resultant thrust loading along the adjacent part of the Sevier orogenic belt during the Maastrichtian may be responsible for this thinning. Erosion of the Sevier highlands along this inactive portion of the orogenic belt may have instead produced broad uplift in the adjacent basin areas because of unloading. Paleocurrent studies in Maastrichtian rocks indicate that eastward-flowing drainage systems off the Sevier orogenic belt were maintained throughout the central Rocky Mountain region despite highly varying subsidence rates. Major Maastrichtian trunk streams tended to remain in place for extended periods of time, creating east–west-trending belts with thick stacks of fluvial sandstones surrounded by much less sandy intervals. Jonah field is located in a major southeast-flowing drainage system that was confined to the rapidly subsiding trough southwest of the Wind River Range. Stream systems that were flowing off rising Laramide uplifts appear to have been relatively short tributary streams to the major east-flowing trunk streams. These tributary streams were commonly mud choked as Cretaceous marine shale sequences were eroded off Laramide uplifts during the initial stages of uplift.