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 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.
A deity of wisdom and war, born fully grown, and armed, from the head of her father Zeus/Jupiter, Minerva – and her Greek counterpart Athena – played an important part in Greek and Roman religion.
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.
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.
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.
Even reputable observers like Pliny the Younger often ended up at the mercy of the competence of later scribes. As his writings only survive as copies, it may be no more than a scribal slip of the hand that immortalised August as the month when Pompeii met its fate.
A long-lost Roman emperor. Who could resist such a headline? The media lapped it up. But how could anyone lose an emperor in the first place? It turns out that this emperor was self-declared, so he wasn’t really an emperor at all
An infant who died at birth during the fourth Bronze Age phase was interred with a hen’s egg over the left hand; perhaps the infant was holding it when placed in the grave. What better symbol can be found for the regeneration of life itself than an egg?
Venturing beyond the ultimate British victory in North America, Anderson delves into parallel conflicts in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and India, as well as a subsequent uprising by Native Americans in Pontiac’s War of 1763
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.
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.
Having learnt Arabic, Hilda would hire and pay their workers. She slept in a hut at Tarkhan with 80 skulls by her bed, living off canned pilchards and bully beef.
As we enter a new year, many of us find ourselves both reflecting on the past and making plans for the future. This dual outlook is embodied by the two-faced god Janus, who governed the first month of the year in ancient Rome
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.
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.
Down we probed into each and, before long, another surprise. Each contained a human skeleton, ranging from an adult woman to a child and, finally, a new-born infant. They were burying the dead under the floorboards!
Haunted by Ostrogothic and Hunnic raids, Panticapaeum still survived as a Byzantine citadel. It lived through a succession of Khazar and Slavic lordships to become the modern city of Kerch, now once more trying to persist through a precarious situation in the current war in Ukraine.
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?
The new All Quiet on the Western Front will, I’m sure, be popular and, like the British feature film 1917 (directed by Sam Mendes), will bring the horror and futility of the war to a new generation.