‘Yes, wonderful things’ is the oft-quoted response Howard Carter gave when, on 26 November 1922, Lord Carnarvon asked if the archaeologist could see anything through a hole in the inner doorway of the tomb of the young king Tutankhamun.…
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.…
A remarkable group of luxurious wall paintings has been discovered at a rich Roman residence called the House of the Harpist in Arles, southern France. The house was discovered beneath an 18th-century glassworks factory in the Trinquetaille district, on the right bank of the Rhône. During excavations of the glassworks…
Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Britain all produced their versions of the type, such as the Bf 110, Potez 630, Fokker G.I, and the Beaufighter.…
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...…
For many centuries, the outside world knew little of the Japanese way of life. Before the Meiji Restoration of 1868 – after which the country rapidly modernised and opened itself up to global trade – only a handful of books and manuscripts had made their way beyond its shores. Some…
Gladius was a general Latin word for ‘sword’. A gladiator was someone who fought with a gladius – a swordsman. As usually employed today, gladius refers to a double-edged short sword.…
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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...…
Active travel, as it is known, is set to become even more popular as people rediscover the riches of the UK’s natural and cultural heritage.…
Seal matrices are inscribed, flat-bottomed metal items used to make impressions on wax to create ‘seals’ – marks of authentication commonly appended to medieval documents. They are made, typically, of lead or copper-alloy and, more rarely, of precious metal. This example, dating to the early 13th century, is made of…
Prehistoric anthropomorphic items made of wood represent rare finds in British archaeology.…
Exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery: 'Anthony Kersting: Kurdistan in the 1940s'…
What buddies could you prefer to a faithful wife? What brothers can you imagine skipping out on her for? A wife’s more trustworthy than friends, more faithful than a brother, and a beautiful bride even beats your mom for loyalty.…
In the 1930s, an admirer remembered Japanese antiquarian Ninagawa Noritane fondly as ‘simple-hearted and unpretentious. He was frugal and sometimes walked around wearing a lampshade hat woven with rush.’ He added, perhaps unnecessarily, ‘It should be said that he was a rather extraordinary individual.’ Certainly Ninagawa lived in extraordinary times.…
As shown by the excitement surrounding the discovery of Tutankhamun 100 years ago, mummies and Egyptian tombs have an impressive ability to capture our imagination. Richard Marranca speaks to Egyptologist Salima Ikram to find out more about these funerary finds, from early medicinal mummies to recent revelations at Saqqara.…
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It is almost time for Current Archaeology Live! 2022, which will run from 25 to 27 February. We have an excellent line-up of leading archaeological experts ready to share their latest thinking on all aspects of the past, and, like last year, the event will be entirely online. In order…
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.…
The British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) recently passed the milestone of one million records generated since the project’s foundation in 1997. Among the highlights announced at the launch of the latest PAS annual report (for 2020) is this gold cross pendant dated to c.AD 700-900. The 26mm-long object (found…
When The Making of the English Landscape by W G Hoskins was published in 1954, its author claimed that ‘no book exists to describe the manner in which the various landscapes of this country came to assume the shape and appearance they now have’. In fact, landscape-level study was far…