Description
Highlights:
- Back at Butser Ancient Farm: reconstructing the past and safeguarding its future
- Darkness dispelled: exploring 1,500 years of life and death at the Sculptor’s Cave
- A story of two castles: tracing the origins of two fortifications in the March of Ewyas
- Touching the past: encountering Iron Age bog bodies
- Time Team returns: how an archaeological institution rose to dig again
In mid-April, with outdoor attractions reopening to the public, CA marked an exciting milestone: our first site visit of 2021. We went to Butser Ancient Farm, the ever-inventive experimental archaeology centre in the South Downs, and this month’s cover feature introduces the site’s latest reconstructed building – a Neolithic house based on remains excavated by Wessex Archaeology near Horton – as well as an online platform devised to safeguard the site’s financial future and help share its research worldwide.
Turning from the Neolithic to later prehistory, our next two features explore enigmatic Bronze Age and Iron Age ways of engaging with the dead. Extensive research focused on the Sculptor’s Cave in Moray has illuminated 1,500 years of activity, including intriguing funerary traditions, at the remote site. We then examine an equally distinctive tradition of treating the dead: what can we learn from bog bodies?
Leaping forward to the medieval period, we then investigate two castles on the Welsh border – who built them so unusually close together, and why?
Finally, this month’s ‘In Focus’ heralds the return of an archaeological institution. It was almost exactly 100 issues ago, in CA 274, that we reported on Time Team coming to an end. This long-running TV programme was hugely influential – not least to me: I was six when the show first aired and pretty much grew up with it. Time Team also gave me my first job in ‘archaeological media’, when I worked as a researcher on Series 18. (Bonus points if you can spot my fleeting on-screen appearance dressed as a Roman!) It’s very exciting, then, to share news of the Team’s plan to carry out two digs in the summer – watch this space for further updates.
Cover Date: Jun-2021, Volume 32 Issue 3
