Description
In this issue:
– Before Stonehenge: Tracing Mesolithic journeys at Blick Mead
– Britain’s forgotten coastal frontline: 1914-1918
– Heathery livrocky land: Rethinking the stones of Neolithic Pembrokeshire
– Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus: Defining the dominions of the ‘Great King of the Britons’
– Trowelblazers: Pioneering female archaeologists
Plus: News, Reviews, Comment, Sherds, Odd Socs, and more!
From the Editor:
How should we study ancient stone monuments? In the past, great ingenuity has been expended oncataloguing them according to ever more intricatetypologies. Now a survey of Neolithic monumentsin Pembrokeshire is applying simpler classificationsand focusing on what these edifices meant to thecommunities that raised them. The results raisequestions about how efforts to clear the first farmingland were commemorated, and whether we can detecta prehistoric desire to keep up with the neighbours.
At Blick Mead, it is understanding the meaning of journeys that is under thespotlight. This remarkable Mesolithic meeting place was established tantalisinglyclose to the later site of Stonehenge. An unprecedented sequence of radiocarbon datesindicates activity from the 8th to the 4th millennium BC, while a dog tooth suggests that visitors may have been drawn from as far afield as the Vale of York.
The First World War brought more unwelcome visitors to the British coast. Enemy submarines took a terrible toll on shipping, while aircraft offered new ways to strengthen or evade coastal defences. We take a look at a project recording theeroding relics of a forgotten frontline before they are lost forever.
Time has long since obliterated any markers tracing out the territory of the Roman client king Cogidubnus – or so it would seem.An attempt to trace the borders of his domain using Long-Distance Alignments has yielded some surprising results.
Finally, we salute the pioneering work undertaken by female archaeologists.
Matt Symonds
Cover Date: Mar-2017, Volume 27 Issue 12