Under the rather ponderous headline ‘Revealing Misunderstandings about Stewardship of Our Ancient Churches’, Historic England has just published the results of its survey into public awareness of the crisis facing the nation’s places of worship. The results show that people are blithely unaware that many are at risk of closure and sale.
The discovery of a mass grave in the Jordanian city of Jerash (ancient Gerasa) has provided evidence of the impact on the population of the Justinian Plague. A newly published study of the burial site has revealed that at least 230 individuals were hastily buried on top of each other, rather than in individual graves, within the city’s abandoned hippodrome
Organisations in the heritage sector welcomed January’s news that the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport was going to invest £1.5 billion in capital funding for the arts, cultural, and heritage sectors in England (the other three home nations have yet to say whether they will be making similar investments)
We all enjoy stories about new discoveries, and it is these that tend to grab the news headlines, but there is another kind of story that gets far less coverage: those that
Christopher Catling, Contributing Editor for CA, delves into the eccentricities of the heritage world.
Christopher Catling, Contributing Editor for CA, delves into the eccentricities of the heritage world.
It is less than a decade since scientists developed swift and efficient methods of extracting and analysing ancient DNA from human remains (for which Svante Pääbo was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Christopher Catling, Contributing Editor for CA, delves into the eccentricities of the heritage world.
Christopher Catling, Contributing Editor for CA, delves into the eccentricities of the heritage world.
Buried in lead The excellent Museum of Antiquities in Rouen, Normandy, has mounted a special exhibition called Le Plomb et l’homme (Lead and Man; open until 5 March 2024) devoted to the
Christopher Catling, Contributing Editor for CA, delves into the eccentricities of the heritage world.
Christopher Catling, Contributing Editor for Current Archaeology, delves into the eccentricities of the heritage world. This is his latest ‘Sherds’ column.
had King Charles been in need of distraction or amusement during his Coronation in May 2023, he could have done worse than study all the graffiti carved into the woodwork of the Coronation Chair
In CA 373, we lamented the lack of a society ready to take on the task of managing the tercentenary of the death of Sir Christopher Wren. Fortunately, the Georgian Group has
Humans in the late Palaeolithic lived mainly on the coastline at a time when sea levels were up to 100m lower than they are today, meaning much of the archaeology of this period now lies below the waves.
Most of us would guess that this was a word of recent coinage, but it first occurred in the lyrics of a 1938 song by the blues singer Lead Belly
The British Museum said that it would continue to use the word ‘mummy’, but would use the name of the mummified person wherever this was known
the programme dramatised one of the essential differences between detectorists and archaeologists: the first are interested in objects (preferably ones that are worth a bob or two), the latter in knowledge.
The treatment of Tennyson and Chaucer stands as a warning to us all not to adopt similarly reductive techniques in our interpretations of history, heritage, and archaeology.
Harold James Dyos, late Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester, wrote that London underwent three distinct periods of growth: an increasingly dense build-up of the population in the centre,
Why not mark the start of the other calendric festivals and their associated deities with holidays?… Time to bring back bonfires, dancing at dawn, May Day frolics, and the dressing of rivers, springs, and wells.
Beneath the foundations of the staircase, the workmen found a wooden chest containing human bones and pieces of velvet. Charles II arranged for the remains to be reinterred in Westminster Abbey, but the bones were re-examined in 1933.
Svante Pääbo is the second member of his family to be elected a Nobel laureate: his father, Sune Bergström (1916-2004) shared the same Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1982. Is there a gene, one wonders, for Nobel-Prize-winning science?