Post-Medieval & Industrial

Historic Houses

Formerly known as the Historic Houses Association (HHA), Historic Houses has just marked its 50th anniversary, having been formed in 1973. A year after its foundation, a campaigning exhibition at the V&A drew attention to the loss of some 2,000…

English Orchards: A landscape history

REVIEW BY AB Until the mid-20th century, England was covered with orchards. But these quintessential features of the historic landscape did not simply spring into being: the story of England’s orchards is filled with generations of people who cultivated them.…

Right Five aqueducts carry the Swansea Canal across major tributaries of the River Tawe. This is the now dry Twrch Aqueduct, showing the thick double sided walls once used to retain its water.

The Swansea Canal: Navigating the history of an industrial artery

In 1789, an opinion column in The Times hailed Britain’s canal-building achievements as a matter of national pride – contrasting them with the revolutionary turmoil in France. Aristocrats and entrepreneurs were losing their heads across the Channel, while in Britain they were busy building and funding a canal network that would serve the rapid growth of the nation as an industrial power. In his new book on the Swansea Canal, Stephen Hughes looks in detail at the archaeology and history of one such pioneering enterprise, as Chris Catling reports.

50 Post-Medieval and Modern Finds

REVIEW BY AB We have so many written and pictorial records created between 1500 and the present day that it might be supposed that artefacts from this time are of less importance than for earlier periods. Laura Burnett and Rob…

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Current Archaeology 406

• War, betrayal, and loss: retracing the story of the Klein Hollandia
• Illuminating Icenian interactions with Rome at Caistor St Edmund
• Christianity and continuity: exploring life in early medieval Wales
• Hard times: investigating life in a 19th-century London workhouse
• Monastic memories: hunting for Hyde Abbey in Winchester

Hard times: Investigating the archaeology of a 19th-century workhouse

This spring marked 300 years since the introduction of the 1723 Workhouse Test Act, often seen as the origin of the workhouse system in England and Wales. These institutions were designed as refuges for the destitute, but ultimately became a byword for cruelty and neglect. What can archaeology add to our understanding of the experiences of those who lived and worked in them? Carly Hilts reports on how recent excavations in London have illuminated one such site.

Deciphering the decipherers: Young Versus Champollion

The rivalry between Young and Champollion in the race to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs is legendary. But what motivated these two scholars, and what qualities did they bring to the endeavour? Andrew Robinson goes in search of the personalities behind an extraordinary intellectual achievement.

Life on an Alaskan lakeshore

Excavations at a site in Alaska have uncovered an ancestral Alutiiq house frozen in time by a fire 3,000 years ago, complete with rarely preserved woven grass mats on the floor. The Nunallerpiaq site sits on the shore of Karluk…

Cromwell’s admiral

In the first part of a new occasional series, Graham Goodlad profiles Robert Blake, the republican ‘general at sea’ who laid the foundations of sea power after the Civil Wars.

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A Victorian rock garden: Celebrating ‘dahlia-mania’ at Stonehenge

For a brief snapshot of the mid-19th century, flower festivals drew thousands of visitors to Stonehenge, long before the Neolithic monument became a popular tourist attraction in its own right. Carly Hilts visited the site and spoke to Louise Crawley, Brian Edwards, and Jennifer Wexler to learn more about this colourful but little-known episode of Salisbury Plain’s past.

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Military History Matters 136

• Wellington at war: how Britain’s greatest general made his name
• The British Templars: new light on a crusading warrior elite
• Master of the dark arts: Dudley Clarke, pioneer of deception
• In Flanders Fields: the cemeteries of WWI
• Arminius: Hitler’s barbarian hero

Pipe up for Pipe Organs

Thomas Hardy’s second novel – Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) – is a masterpiece of rural comedy with a tragedy at its heart: the usurpation of the centuries-old tradition of church music, represented by the loss of the west-gallery musicians…

Finds Tray – Eprouvette

This unusual object was recently found in a garden near Boldre in the New Forest. While its function was a bit of a mystery when the finder first brought it to the Finds Liaison Officer to be recorded, it was…