As Autumn draws towards its close, this is a time of year when thoughts turn towards people and places that have gone before. Our cover feature concerns a voyage that took place 400 years ago: the sailing of the Mayflower, which set out for the New World in 1620. Its departure point, Plymouth, has opened a new museum (The Box) whose inaugural exhibition marks the expedition’s anniversary. What can we learn of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ and the bustling port city they left behind?

We also trace the long-vanished kelp industry that employed thousands of families on the west coast and islands of Scotland between 1750 and 1820. After this brief boom, production disappeared from our shores – what has been left behind for archaeologists to uncover?

Further enigmatic clues await at Fulford, just outside York. This location witnessed the Battle of Fulford in 1066, the first of three engagements that culminated in the Norman Conquest. Fulford’s Old St Oswald Church is a post-Conquest building, but did it have an Anglo-Saxon predecessor that might have witnessed those watershed events?

Remaining in North Yorkshire, we next visit Aldborough, home to the remains ofIsurium Brigantum, once a prosperous Roman town. A decade of investigations has shed fascinating light on when Isurium was founded and how it evolved, including extensive geophysical surveys that have revealed vivid details of its streets and buildings.

We explore more images in our fourth feature, taking a tour of a unique digital archive curated in Oxford. The HEIR Project preserves long-lost vistas and fascinating photographs of past archaeological excavations – pictures worth thousands of words.