TP17 034 - Kent Archaeological Notification Areas – Palaeolithic Specialist

Kent County Council (the Council) is the largest local authority in England covering an area of 3,500 square kilometres. It has an annual expenditure of over £1bn on goods and services and a population of 1.3m. The Council provides a wide range of personal and strategic services on behalf of its residents, operating in partnership with 12 district councils and 289 parish/town councils.
The Council consists of four directorates
• Social Care, Health and Wellbeing
• Education and Young People’s Services
• Growth, Environment and Transport
• Strategic and Corporate Services
This requirement is for Archaeological Notification Areas within the Growth, Environment and Transport Directorate.
The council is shortly to submit an application for a Historic England grant to carry out a project to revise its Archaeological Notification Areas (ANAs). This is a GIS layer that guides local planning authorities (LPAs) as to whether or not to consult KCC on planning applications. The intention is to revise this layer to provide greater flexibility and increased guidance so that the number of unnecessary consultations is reduced and so that local authorities and applicants have better information about what kind of archaeological assessment may be needed as part of the application process.
The project will concern all types of heritage asset of all archaeological periods. However, there will be a distinct difference between how the Palaeolithic period and the post-Palaeolithic periods are addressed. The Palaeolithic resource in Kent is of international significance and has aspects of its identification and management that are distinctly different from other periods. KCC therefore wishes to engage a Palaeolithic specialist to support the project. The specialist will carry out a number of tasks that will lead to the definition of ANAs for the Palaeolithic period and will advise on how these can be merged with those of the post-Palaeolithic periods to produce a single dataset. They will also help to write advice notes for a number of key Palaeolithic ANAs that will help guide developers as to the likely planning requirement and the work that may be needed.