I was delighted to be invited to the fifth Shanghai Archaeology Forum last December, happily revived after the COVID closedowns. This meeting is becoming a major fixture in the archaeological calendar, for every two years the advisory committee is asked to adjudicate all the nominations for field discovery and research awards.
Our Neanderthal cousins may now be extinct, but they are rarely out of the news. Writing in The Conversation, archaeologist Steven Mithen tackles the perennial question of why Homo sapiens flourished while Neanderthals died out by examining the differences between the brain cavities of the two species
After last month’s scramble through Stonehenge, this month I turn north to amble around Avebury. I know I am not the only one to hold this site in high affection.
As part of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, one of the last acts of the outgoing government was to authorise Historic England to extend the blue plaques scheme to the whole of England.
A new organisation has come into being in Wales, in a bold move designed to increase the capacity of the four Welsh Archaeological Trusts (WATs) to compete for major developer-funded contracts, while building on their reputation for specialist regional expertise and service delivery.
In my columns to date I have barely mentioned Stonehenge. This is deliberate: for all that I worship archaeology, I am an atheist about this most famous of sites.
In the complex story of human migration out of Africa, Homo sapiens are believed to have travelled steadily eastwards to Asia – eventually reaching Australia by around 50,000 years ago – but seem not to have moved into Europe for a period of 20,000 years.
There has, of late, been a veritable tsunami of results from recent research that are literally transforming prehistory before our very eyes.
Nick Spenceley recalls one of the great works of military history.
Last month I began a tour around the final county of the UK that I had yet to visit in these pages: Wiltshire. I began in the north and headed south as far as the Vale of Pewsey. This month I will continue into what is popularly seen as the most fertile of all archaeological hunting grounds: the county’s central belt around Salisbury Plain
Historic England has recently listed three properties that have been claimed as the ‘first’ examples of their kind (not, it has to be said, by Historic England themselves – they know better than to invite a pantomimic chorus of ‘Oh no it’s not!’, but the media are not so subtle).
Secret tunnels are a trope of local folklore – many a town in the UK has its story about long-lost underground passages, doubtless providing the inhabitants of a monastery or castle an escape route from their confinement.
I have now examined the archaeology of every county in Britain bar one – Wiltshire. This was no accident, for I have a confession to make: Wiltshire’s archaeology terrifies me.
He told us that he was a speleologist, whose girlfriend had just left him. He was in a very sorry state of distress.
It might have been used as an antiseptic or… a hunger suppressant – or just because people liked the taste.
