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Excavating the Hebrides

the star of the show is undoubtedly Cladh Hallan in the south of the island, famous for its Bronze Age ‘mummies’, the earliest evidence of deliberate mummification found in Britain.…

Excavating Orkney and Shetland

before I leave the Mainland, I must mention one other site of this era, the stunning Neolithic house at St Ola, just south of Kirkwall... Here was discovered the oldest art yet found on the islands.…

Becoming an archaeologist

Archaeology is not immune to wider social changes... the #BlackLivesMatter movement focused attention on the colonial pasts of many nations and on the challenges of the post-colonial present.…

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Excavating the Highlands

To many, this part of the country is the ‘definitive’ Scottish landscape of their dreams, the stuff of countless movies and TV shows. To less romantically inclined archaeologists, it is a place forged by the environmental extremes experienced there.…

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Excavating Scotland

Moving geographically west to east, we then come to Bearsden on the north-west outskirts of Glasgow. This site is, if not the most excavated of Antonine sites, then certainly that most visited by Current Archaeology.…

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Excavating Northamptonshire

If there is a challenger to Piddington’s crown as the ‘prime’ site of Northamptonshire, then the multi-period site of Raunds in the north-east of the county, with its intriguing history of early medieval and later settlement, is a strong contender.…

Excavating Staffordshire

Staffordshire’s coverage in terms of prehistory begins intriguingly late. The one big surprise to me while researching this column was that the oldest sites featured only date to the Iron Age. If you are an archaeologist at work in the county, here is a chance to remedy this.…

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Excavating Worcestershire and Warwickshire

On the edge of a former prehistoric river channel, archaeologists found mammal bones, plant fossils, insect remains, and mollusc shells, along with stone tools, indicating that humans were exploiting this resource at least 500,000 years ago.…

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Excavating Suffolk

The result of many years’ fieldwork by local voluntary and educational organisations came to a head there in the early 1990s, when a long-proposed bypass was constructed, destroying major elements of the Roman settlement.…

Excavating Essex

One discovery in Essex above all others has regularly hit the archaeological headlines since the early 2000s – the spectacular Saxon princely burial from Prittlewell, near Southend-on-Sea. This was... one of the most exciting finds made in Britain in this period.…

Excavating Hertfordshire

The site began life as a simple farmstead in the 1st century AD and transformed over the centuries into quite a grandiose stone structure, with a swimming pool and bath complex, by the mid-2nd century AD.…

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Excavating Berkshire

One of Berkshire’s oddities is that it is often forgotten that perhaps its most famous historic site is in the county at all – that of Windsor Castle. Such is the nature of this historic royal fortress, palace, and showpiece that the county fades away around it.…

Excavating Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire

Dramatic evidence was found here for Iron Age ritual practices: parts of at least five human bodies were discovered, arranged round the western edge of a shallow hollow filled full of articulated animal bones.…

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Excavating Cambridgeshire

Meanwhile, at Yaxley, Current Archaeology reported on work examining the archaeology of the ‘second’ English Civil War, during which the village church of St Peter’s was the scene of an extraordinary bombardment.…

Excavating Leicestershire and Rutland

The discovery, excavation, and analysis of the Richard III's remains in Leicester between 2012 and 2015 was one of the most famous archaeological projects of recent times, drawing global attention to the city.…

Excavating Lincolnshire

The concentration of artefacts was so rich that it led prehistorian Mike Parker Pearson to compare Fiskerton to La Tène, the 19th-century Swiss lakeside excavation that had a profound influence on our understanding of Iron Age Europe.…

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