A recent Netflix documentary, Secrets of the Neanderthals, has attracted a massive worldwide audience, and taken a major step forward in dealing with the widespread myth that Neanderthals were brutish and backward. As we now know from comparing their DNA and ours, we can count them among our remote ancestors.
‘Good-morning, good morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
These lines from Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘The General’ were written in 1917.
Sherds was intrigued to encounter two interesting items recently that have to do with the treatment of human remains. (Anyone who is grieving or has suffered a recent bereavement might like to skip over these reports.)
This month’s column comprises the latest in a ‘Roman towns’ miniseries. I have recently visited Chester and Colchester, and next up is Cirencester (Corinium).
Looking for signs of hope that heritage and culture will be safe in the hands of future generations, Sherds spotted a number of media reports recently that claimed to know the minds of young people. Recent surveys have stated that Zoomers (Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012) are currently into churchgoing, barn dancing, and buying telescopes.
Last month’s visit to Chester/Deva got me thinking about the other great urban sites of Roman Britain. I have previously visited Silchester/Calleva (CA 337, April 2018), Wroxeter/Viroconium (CA 338, May 2018), and London (CA 416, November 2024), but what about other Roman towns and cities?
A few years ago, Sarah Paris – then a graduate student at Cambridge University – asked if she could access the human skeletons from Khok Phanom Di in order to study the mortuary use of red ochre. I excavated this great Neolithic site in 1985, and I willingly agreed. Last year, she completed her doctoral dissertation and at the last Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand, she won the prize for the best presentation by a graduate student.
Parallel tracks have been found in fossilised mud at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, USA, and interpreted as the marks left by a travois: a timber frame used by Native Americans for transporting goods. Particularly associated with Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains region of North America, a travois is made by joining two long poles and a third shorter one to create an A-shaped frame.
Spring is upon us in the northern hemisphere and people are venturing out into the open again: into their gardens, onto their balconies, into urban parks or the countryside to enjoy the miracle of spring and the verdant, flowering flora that accompanies it.
Nick Spenceley reconsiders Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History.
The Westminster Government has published its revised National Planning Policy Framework amid a flurry of boosterish phrases about ‘backing builders not blockers’, ‘unleashing billions in economic growth’, and introducing ‘seismic reforms to help builders get shovels in the ground quicker’.
Roman Chester – Deva Victrix – is one of the unquestioned ‘great sites’ of Roman Britain. This was a major military centre from its late 1st-century AD origins through to its abandonment in the late 4th/early 5th centuries AD, and significant parts of the town survive beneath the medieval and modern city.
Sherds adopts a very broad definition of ‘heritage’, so no apologies for beginning this month’s column by drawing attention to the 70th anniversary of the establishment of tiddlywinks as a competitive university-based sport.
My column this month is on one of the least-known ‘great sites’ of all: Offa’s Dyke, the linear earthwork that stretches along the Welsh/English border. Most people know Hadrian’s Wall, and a fair few the Antonine Wall, but how many of us can say that we are familiar with Offa’s Dyke, either the standing sections of it that survive or the National Trail of that name that runs from Sedbury in the south to Prestatyn in the north?
Tacitus, in his book on the life and character of his father-in-law Julius Agricola, the Roman Governor of Britain from c.AD 77 to 84, makes the often-quoted observation that ‘Britons make no distinction of sex in their leaders’. In his Annals (XIV.35), the same author depicts Boudica (AD 30-61) rallying her supporters with the cry: ‘we British are used to women commanders in war’.
I have already described here the new discoveries at Sanxingdui, the great city that commanded the Sichuan Plain in China from 1200 BC (CWA 110). However, I cannot refrain from returning to it, because a couple of months ago a most welcome and unexpected email arrived.
‘The unknown town now had a name… All that day “Naukratis” rang in my mind, and I sprang over the mounds with that splendid exultation of a new discovery, long wished for and well found.’ The prospect of discovering ancient cities, lost for centuries in the depths of jungles or deserts, was part of the original lure (and original sin) of archaeology.
Younger readers might be forgiven for thinking that Enemy at the Gates is merely a novelisation of the 2001 film of the same name. But the movie – directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Jude Law – in fact takes its title from William Craig’s groundbreaking 1973 history of Stalingrad, the first Western history to make extensive use of Russian sources.
By the time you read this, February fill dyke will be over for another year and March will (perhaps) have come in like a lion. Sherds is always glad when winter is over, but in the depths of the cold, dark, and grey weeks of January and February there is one sure way to find warmth and consolation – by reaching for a book called Next to Nature, an anthology of the ‘Word from Wormingford’ diary columns that Ronald Blythe wrote for many years for the Church Times.
Tintagel in Cornwall can be considered a ‘great site’ for a number of reasons, depending on personal perspective. For some, the draw is its rich archaeology; for others, its links to King Arthur, or its dramatic coastal settings.