Raiding parties often consisted of genetically similar people, suggesting that they probably came from a single community or were members of the same family, such as the four brothers in one boat burial in Estonia who died on the same day.
More than half a century after its publication, it is widely regarded as the inescapable starting point for scholars working on early 20th-century British naval history. What made Marder such an outstanding historian? Above all, it is his command of the primary sources.
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.
Woodchester Mansion is considered to be one of the UK’s most haunted buildings, and people pay large sums to spend the night in the freezing cold mansion with their ghost-detecting cameras and radar equipment.
The objectionable trough has survived, though the figures are so eroded that you need advanced powers of imagination to see anything erotic or outrageous in these maenads – female followers of the wine god, Dionysus.
We know that Britain experienced tumultuous events during Hadrian’s reign. What we do not know is the order in which they played out. The answer may hold the key to understanding Britain’s premier Roman monument, as Matthew Symonds explains.
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.
Neil went on to propose using what R G Collingwood called ‘the historical imagination’ by blending data and interpretation to ‘tell the story’. He was convinced that this ‘must be done if archaeology is to be interesting and worthwhile’.
The Princess was not buried alone. Alongside her was a grave big enough for an adult, which contained the ochre covered skeleton of a little girl aged about 18 months, covered in about 15,000 shell beads and, lo and behold, a tiny clay anvil for shaping pots.
The death of Prince Philip was marked on Tanna with traditional rites and tribute ceremonies: the consensus among members of the sect is that the Duke’s spirit has returned to its island home…
Traders poured in, London flourished, and in ten years it became the biggest town in Britain. But then, disaster! Boudica rebelled and London was destroyed: traces of burning from this episode are still visible in the lower layers of excavations.
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.
The story was seen as a further blow to the argument that the Marbles must stay in London – replicas ‘accurate to a millimetre’ could be displayed at the British Museum and few visitors would know the difference.
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.
Inventive Vents has a clever way of engaging younger people with scatological anecdotes, in the style of Horrible Histories. Thus we are told that the innocuously named Carting Lane was known colloquially as ‘Farting Lane’ because of the smell of sewer gas.
So, what’s different about this incarnation of Team Time? Besides the charm and expertise of several new cast members, these episodes wholly embrace the countless scientific advances in dating and scanning that have occurred over the last decade.
People investing in DNA ancestry kits should be aware that they might not get the answers they were expecting: people who want to know if they have Viking DNA or are related to Richard III might instead discover an awkward family secret.
The civil war had been very disruptive. There had been looting, pillage, and social upheaval. There are records of a most heinous crime, rooting up the boundary markers of land ownership, for which those guilty were impaled.
Take Roman family portraits, for example. Either they were on public display to advertise the social standing of the family, or they were objects of veneration in the cult of ancestor-worship; or both.
As all who worked with him here would agree, he was not just a man of extraordinary and wide-ranging intellectual and professional ability, but also a hugely generous, thoughtful, and kind collaborator and colleague…