One of the joys of the Current Archaeology archive is its ‘tales of the unexpected’. After last month’s column on early medieval monasteries, this and next month’s columns will be companion pieces exploring .
In my previous two columns I explored some of the great religious buildings of Britain; these are primarily known for their medieval and later histories, and for their towering urban architecture. This month, I will move back in time to explore some of the great sites associated with the early church that have been visited by Current Archaeology over the decades.
After last month’s column on Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, and Canterbury Cathedral, I will continue my ecclesiastical theme this month by exploring three of the great religious buildings in the north of England: York Minster, Durham Cathedral, and Whitby Abbey.
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.
This stunning coastal location is better known for its Pictish carvings, but researchers have shown that it has a much longer, and more enigmatic, prehistoric pedigree, dating back at least as far as the Bronze Age.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While investigating a site near Clifton in the south-western suburbs of Nottingham, Wessex Archaeology found evidence of a late Iron Age/early Romano-British farmstead, as well as the remains of two of its residents.
His work included ethnographic research into different forms of shipbuilding, especially the construction of vessels without the use of metal fasteners, which took Seán to sites near and far, from the west coast of Ireland to the east coast of India.  Â
Large infrastructure projects have led to some remarkable discoveries down the years – think of Heathrow Terminal 5, as well as the more recent work along the route of HS2
Perhaps Sussex’s most famous ‘site’ of all featured in CA 286, when the Time Team examined rival theories of the location of the AD 1066 Battle of Hastings.
Fishbourne is just about the largest Roman villa yet to be discovered in this country, but until excavations began the site was virtually unknown…
The county is one that historically suffers from being overlooked: its proximity, and partial absorption, into Greater London risks obscuring its significance.