Joe Flatman

Joe Flatman

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.

Above There are many multi period sites in Scotland that have been highlighted over the decades: CA 360 reported on the Tarradale Through Time Project, which uncovered the history of the Black Isle from the Mesolithic to post medieval period, while CA 280 investigated the inhabitation of the Ardnamurchan Peninsula from the Neolithic to the 19th century.

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.

Excavating the archives… from Fife to Moray

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.

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.

Above & Left Northamptonshire is home to many rich Roman sites, such as the Roman villa at Piddington, which has featured several times in the magazine, including in CA 146, and at Priors Hall near Corby, where the discovery of a villa, linked industrial site, and intriguing Roman Celtic temple mausoleum was detailed in CA 370.

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.

Right Featuring in the news section of CA 188, this colourful 2nd century AD bronze dish, known as the ‘Moorlands pan’, was found in 2003 along the Staffordshire/Derbyshire border; inscribed on it are the names of several forts along Hadrian’s Wall.

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.

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.

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.

ABOVE & LEFT CA’s forays into Essex’s archaeology have included prehistoric and Saxon features at Springfield (CA 108) and, more recently, the discovery of the Burnham Hoard (CA 252).

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.

RIGHT & BELOW CA’s coverage of Hertfordshire has focused primarily on the archaeology of the Roman 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.

LEFT & ABOVE Prehistoric sites at Kingsmead Quarry and Datchet, in CA 292 and CA 351, revealed traces of Neolithic life.

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.

RIGHT CA 343 explored Trumpington, on the western edge of Cambridge, where archaeologists have found impressive early medieval burials.

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.

Right The discovery of the skeleton of Richard III underneath a car park in Leicester in 2012 drew international attention and led to three CA cover features.

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.

LEFT & ABOVE Previous issues of CA have explored the archaeology of the Trent across a variety of time periods, from Neolithic and Bronze Age waterworks to medieval and Tudor fishing weirs.

Excavating the East Midlands

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.

LEFT Seán McGrail (1928 2021): Royal Navy pilot, Master Mariner, and distinguished professor of archaeology.

Professor of Archaeology Seán McGrail

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.