An international team of archaeologists specialising in early prehistory has undertaken pioneering survey work in and around one of the tallest mountains in the United Arab Emirates. George Nash, Genevieve von Petzinger, Aitor Ruiz, Juan F Ruiz López, and Yamandu Hilbert explain how their work unfolded and what they discovered.
A remarkable trade between Europe and China developed in the 1700s, when an emperor with a passion for science started collecting extravagant mechanical timepieces. The results are both beautiful to behold and steeped in a meeting of skills and cultures between East and West, as Jane Desborough told Matthew Symonds.
D-Day, 80 years on: Graham Goodlad examines Germany’s flawed preparations to resist an Allied invasion of North-West Europe.
The decisive victory of World War II in Western Europe took place 80 years ago this summer. On 6 June 1944, after months of planning, around 150,000 men from five divisions – two American, two British, and one Canadian —…
A new exhibition at the British Museum looks at a soldier’s life at the height of the Roman Empire. Here, the show’s lead curator Richard Abdy considers some of the extraordinary objects on view, and reveals how they helped turn the Roman Army into such a formidable fighting force.
After the Russian Revolution, one young officer forged a career so strange that it went down in legend. Tim Newark examines the short and bloody life of Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, and recalls his bizarre mission to create his own barbarian empire in the Russian far east.
Amid the turmoil of the American Indian wars, a tiny band of US Army irregulars held out against a far larger force of Native American warriors. Fred Chiaventone tells the remarkable story of Major George Forsyth’s desperate last stand on an island in the Arikaree River.
He was the ‘Crusader King’, whose exploits made him a national hero. But does Richard I deserve his reputation as a martial genius? Stephen Roberts studies his final campaign in search of clues.
A major new exhibition at the British Museum shows what life was like for the men, women, and children associated with the Roman military machine – and those they encountered through campaign and conquest. Carly Hilts visited to learn more.
Excavations in central London have revealed the remains of a c.2,000 year-old cemetery, where waterlogged soil conditions have preserved an extraordinary array of wooden finds, including coffins and what may be the first complete funerary bed from Roman Britain. Carly Hilts learned more from Gwilym Williams.
In last month’s ‘Sherds’ column, Chris Catling described the threat to the future of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW), so we asked him to tell us more about the work of the Commission, as well as the heritage sector in Wales more generally. Here is his report.
Excavations in central Cambridge have uncovered traces of one of the medieval town’s many religious communities, including remains of the friary itself, and of the people who were buried in its bounds. Craig Cessford reports.
New analysis of two Bronze Age burials discovered more than a century – and over 300 miles – apart has raised intriguing questions about prehistoric ideas of family relationships, highlighting cross-Channel cultural links stretching back 5,000 years. Carly Hilts reports.
José María Barrera describes the beautifully restored ceiling of the pronaos of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera.
Retired obstetrician W Benson Harer Jr explores the role of a special magic talisman in protecting pregnant women in ancient Egypt.
Sean P Rigby explores Roman influence on the post-pharaonic religious life of Egypt.
Robert G Morkot tells us about the life and achievements of one of the most remarkable and influential characters of the New Kingdom.
Just like us, ancient Egyptians enjoyed a good party with plenty of food and drink!
Aidan Dodson explores how the history of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty has been pieced together over the past two centuries, emerging only recently from the racist views of early Egyptology scholars.
Last summer, excavations at Warham Camp – a monumental Iron Age enclosure in north Norfolk – revealed intriguing clues to the site’s date and purpose. Carly Hilts visited the project and spoke to Andy Hutcheson to find out more.
In the year AD 580, St Aidan crossed the Irish Sea from St Davids in Pembrokeshire (where he had been studying as St David’s favourite pupil) to Rosslare in County Wexford. Eighteen years later, he established a new monastery at Ferns, in the same county. This grew to become one of south-east Ireland’s most important settlements, a seat of royal power and the site of an Augustinian abbey. Little was known about the early history, however, until the Irish Archaeology Field School launched a major research project in June 2021. With commendable speed, the first fruits of that research have just been published, as Chris Catling reports.
Roman histories attest that thousands of Sarmatian warriors – renowned horse-riders from the Caucasus – were resettled in Britain after their defeat by Marcus Aurelius in AD 175, but vanishingly few archaeological traces of their presence here have been found. Now scientific analysis of a skeleton found during the excavation of a Roman farmstead in Cambridgeshire has produced what is thought to be the first genetic evidence of an individual from that region. Carly Hilts reports.
Found in the 19th century, the Knaresborough Hoard is one of the largest and most unusual late Roman metalwork hoards known from Britain – but until recently its contents had never been studied in detail, and the circumstances of its discovery were shrouded in mystery. Carly Hilts reports on recent research that has brought to light new elements of the story of these objects.
When the Salisbury Plain village of Imber was taken over by the War Department in 1943, its inhabitants all departed, never to return. What has recent archaeological work revealed about the life and death of a long-lived Wiltshire community? Richard Osgood reports.
A piece of armour that would have been worn by a legionary stationed on Rome’s northern frontier almost 2,000 years ago has been painstakingly pieced back together. Bethan Bryan, Fraser Hunter, and Richard Abdy share the latest thinking on this rare object.
A major new cave-art discovery has recently been made in Cova Dones, Spain. The nature of these images poses fascinating questions about how and where Palaeolithic people created such art, as Aitor Ruiz-Redondo told Matthew Symonds.
Japanese burial mounds can be stunning in scale, while the decorated tomb chambers and grave goods sometimes found within have the power to astonish. In the first of a two-part series examining these tombs, Simon Kaner introduces the archaeology of burials mounds from the 3rd-8th centuries AD.
Fresh knowledge about global trade and travel is coming to light in the Jordanian desert. A survey project is revealing information about the chronology of a small fort or fortlet and presumed caravanserai at the site of Khirbet al-Khalde in southern Jordan. Taking us through archival data, new archaeological finds, and the use of drone imagery, the co directors of the project Craig Harvey, Emanuele Intagliata, and Rubina Raja unravel new narratives about this fascinating desert site.
In the first of a two-part feature, Richard Hodges untangles the early evolution of the famed Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino.
The city of Sydney has changed beyond recognition since it was founded as Britain’s first Australian penal colony in 1788. Carly Hilts set out to explore some of the surviving traces of its earliest years.
Graham Goodlad analyses Slim’s crucial victory, which dispelled the myth of Japanese invincibility.
In our two-part special for this issue, Graham Goodlad first profiles Slim and then looks in detail at Imphal and Kohima.
In the third part of our series on deception in World War II, Taylor Downing uncovers the true story of double agents Brutus and Garbo.
One of the crucial battles of the Franco-Prussian War was also the scene of perhaps the last successful cavalry charge in Western European warfare, as William E Welsh explains.
The Norman Conquest of 1066 remains one of the best-known events in English history – but French attempts to invade three centuries later have now largely been forgotten, as Duncan Cameron explains.
At the outbreak of the First World War, a terrible new weapon changed the rules of naval warfare. One hundred and ten years on, David Porter takes a deep dive into Germany’s submarine threat.