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Seeking a legendary lost city

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.…

Interpreting art

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.…

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In Memoriam: Dr Neil Faulkner

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...…

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War on Film: Benediction

The early stages of Benediction (written and directed by Terence Davies) deal with this story in a very cursory way. There is no treatment of Sassoon (Jack Lowden) as a war hero. The distant conflict is covered by extremely poor-quality black-and-white archive.…

‘Hippy’ archaeologists

The ‘hippy generation’ prefers to tell archaeological narratives that paint our ancestors as egalitarian, caring for weaker members of society and welcoming migrants for the new skills and ideas.…

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Last Word: Neil Faulkner

Neil was an interesting person, as he lived two lives. One was as an archaeologist, as a tour guide, excavator, and valued contributor to our magazines. But he also had another life, as a revolutionary Marxist...…

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.…

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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.…

Victorian architecture

There is a growing realisation that the solution to the climate emergency is to retrofit existing buildings, with all their embodied carbon and energy, rather than to build new ‘environmentally sustainable’ structures in place of old.…

Surveying Verulamium

We all gathered round on another day, when a whoop of excitement emerged from the next-door shop, where Professor Frend was working in a cellar. He had just found the lovely bronze statuette of Venus, now a proud exhibit in the Verulamium Museum…

Celebrity beasts

The statues of five elephants surrounding this part of the cemetery have led to the belief that these and other circus animals are buried here along with the human victims of the Hammond circus train disaster of 22 June 1918.…

Academic mass production

Every paper has to say something new. In the mass production of vehicle components, difference is defect. In the mass production of academic papers, difference is a requirement.…

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.…

Clerical sinners and forgeries

Quarreling was commonplace, especially over who was entitled to sit in ‘the best’ pews. Clergy complained about being assaulted: one Kentish aristocrat took his hawk to church in 1514 and punched the vicar in the face when chastised for doing so.…

The Treasures of Sanxingdui

The contents of those two pits amaze. They include some of the most remarkable bronzes from the ancient world: human face-masks with protruding eyes, thought to depict Cancong, the mythical first king of Shu.…

Making a difference?

The wealth produced by Egyptian peasants was spent on warfare, monuments, and luxury. Egyptian artisans were despised as manual labourers. So Egyptian civilisation looked essentially the same in 30 BC as it had done in 3000 BC.…

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