Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy’s The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World was so significant a book in its day that it would have sat in the libraries of middle-class households alongside the Bible, Shakespeare’s Complete Works, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
My ‘great site’ this month is one close to many people’s hearts. When I think of the locations that embody the best of Current Archaeology as a magazine and British archaeology as a community, I consistently alight on Fishbourne Roman Palace in West Sussex. This site has it all – great coverage in the magazine, enthusiastic public engagement, stunning finds, and charismatic custodians.
Sherds does not share the passion for cycling that seems to have gripped so many people over the last two decades. In the words of the self-styled ‘Super-Tramp’, W H Davies, ‘A poor life this if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare’, and it is the standing and staring that walking permits, whereas cycling (uphill at any rate, with traffic presenting an ever-present threat) seems full of care
After more than 50 columns exploring the archaeology of the British Isles through a geographic lens, I begin here a new thematic focus: that of ‘great’ sites visited by Current Archaeology down the years. As I neared the end of my tour of the four nations, I reflected on the enduring power of a ‘great’ site.
The sounds that one associates with places of worship are those of an angelic choir or the intricate patterns of a Bach fugue. Some churches have, however, been enjoying success with the rather more unexpected pairing of doom metal bands and church organs.
Ancient city culture was inescapable in the societies where it prevailed. It suffused life to encompass almost everyone. Even the dead.
Stonehenge is often portrayed as if it were a unique monument, which in some respects it is. No other surviving monument uses mortise-and-tenon joints to lock the lintels to the uprights that form the massive stone circle and the inner trilithons (though this kind of joint was probably used in similar monuments built from timber that have not survived).
My first experience of fieldwork in Southeast Asia found me in Roi et province of Northeast Thailand. It was a total accident that led me to this spot. The mighty Mekong River was then in the early stages of being seriously affected by the construction of hydro dams on its tributaries.
Frank Richards holds a unique place in military writing, for several reasons. His book Old Soldiers Never Die is reckoned to be among the finest war memoirs ever produced, and one of very few to be written by a private soldier. Richards was himself a rarity, having survived active service from the beginning of the First World War in 1914 right through to its conclusion in November 1918.
In my second column on the archaeology of Greater London, I stroll through the Saxon town, meander through the medieval city, and finally alight on some post-medieval and modern sites. There is a lot to review here, from the evidence of London’s last Romans to those who lived here in some of its most difficult of times: the Blitz during the Second World War.
In September, Sherds attended a lecture given by Richard Dance, Professor of Early English in the Cambridge University Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, on the theme of ‘Vikings in your Vocabulary: Adventures in the History of English’, based on his Gersum Project (www.gersum.org) looking at the Scandinavian influence on our language.
My final geographically themed review focuses on London. I touched on some sites there in my reviews of Roman archaeology and the Thames (CA 330 and CA 343), so these columns will
Sherds has recently been working on a response to the Welsh Government’s consultation on its draft Culture Strategy. This has been an opportunity for the arts, heritage, and culture sector to reflect on questions that are not just relevant to Wales.
I would like to dedicate these pages to my PhD supervisor, Eric Higgs. After studying at the London School of Economics, he bought a hill farm in Shropshire at the outset of the Second World War, and spent the following decade rearing sheep and cattle, with the objective, he once told me, of breeding miniature versions of the former.
Archaeologists, like most people, have an urge to grasp the world through something tangible or, even better, countable. There can be a great comfort in numbers, and numbers also convince; many have been the attempts to define cities by countable characteristics: an area of at least 10ha, 10,000 inhabitants, a certain number of public meeting places, a particular thickness of city walls in metres.
In 1418, Captain ‘One-eyed’ Zarco sailed out from Lisbon to plant the flag of Portugal on the islands first of Porto Santo and then of Madeira. In doing so, he not only claimed for Portugal a useful harbour and a staging post that would enable explorations further out into the Atlantic – first to the Azores and then to Brazil – he also secured a fertile, well-wooded, and well-watered island where sugar cane flourished, making Madeiran landowners and the Portuguese Crown extremely rich for a century by selling ‘white gold’ through the markets of Venice, London, and Antwerp.
Any novelist approaching a publisher with an idea for a series of stories centred around a cowardly, bullying racist, who is also a serial philanderer, would nowadays be very quickly shown the door. Yet George MacDonald Fraser achieved celebrity and surprising academic respect for just such a series, which consisted of 12 books published between 1969 and 2005.
Since March 2020 I have criss-crossed the United Kingdom, examining its history through the eyes of Current Archaeology. I have now visited every county in every country, but I have just a few geographical loose ends to tie off, including, this month, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.
When Venice features in the media, the story is usually about the malign consequences of flooding, cruise ships, and tourism, which crowds out more positive news, like the development of the Venice Time Machine, due to be showcased at this year’s European Association of Archaeologists conference in Rome.
I concluded last month’s column just east of Avebury at the Sanctuary, a Neolithic and Bronze Age site that is also the start and end point of the Ridgeway, an 87-mile route rich in archaeology that runs between there and Ivinghoe Beacon across Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire