Divers recently discovered a 3,000 year-old shipwreck near Salcombe, which carried a huge cargo of copper and tin: is this the first evidence for Late Bronze Age long-distance maritime trade in bulk goods? Chris Yates, of the South West Maritime Archaeological Group, explains.
Are you heading out on a dig this season? If so, congratulations! Volunteers are an essential part of the excavation season. We’ve put together a short guide, including a checklist, to identify key areas for your preparation. Happy (and safe) digging!
Former CA Editor Lisa Westcott spent an inspiring week in the trenches, brushing up on her digging skills and meeting volunteers.
The event that was subsequently recognised as the first Pilgrimage was held in 1849, when John Collingwood Bruce, a distinguished Newcastle lawyer, led a small group of ‘pilgrims’ to walk the length of Hadrian’s Wall.
Crete lies in an earthquake zone. This has affected the island over the centuries, but how? Although never fully recognised, in the 1850s Captain Spratt, of the Royal Navy, worked it out. Dudley Moore explains.
Today, only 20 people live on Foula, and the ferry takes just one car at a time. More than 3,000 years ago, Bronze Age people erected a monument of 290 standing stones on the tiny, rocky, storm-battered island of Foula. As John Oswin reports, members of the Bath and Camerton Archaeological Society – working a long way from home – have been exploring.
The field of archaeology covers the full extent of human existence, through time and across the world. Small wonder it has spawned so many sub-disciplines, theoretical and practical. We look at some of the choices.
How do you deal with a witch? In 17th century England, the answer was obvious: you prepare a ‘witch bottle’, with contents equally as bizarre as those in the cauldron of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”. Witch bottles were white magic devices, that…
In 1969, fire raged through this exceptional Elizabethan house. Paul Drury explains what archaeologists were able to rescue from the burnt-out husk.
Geography made a unitary empire embracing the Mediterranean and temperate Europe inherently unstable; but the wreckage of the Roman Empire contained the building blocks of modern Europe. In the third and final part of our series based on Cunliffe’s new book, Europe between the Oceans, we chart the changes from Caesar to Charlemagne.
The former frontiers of the Roman Empire are set to become the world’s biggest single archaeological site. UNESCO World Heritage Site status is now in prospect for the frontiers as a whole. Historic Scotland’s David Breeze is a leading advocate of the move. Neil Faulkner asked him to explain why the Roman imperial frontiers deserve such special treatment.
The Bamburgh Research Project is picking up the pieces of the archaeological work started by legendary eccentric Dr Brian Hope-Taylor, who had left virtually no record of his excavations – or so it was believed. The story of Bamburgh is two-fold: before properly investigating the site, the team must first excavate the archaeologist who worked there 60 years ago.
In the second part of our mini-series based on Barry Cunliffe’s new book Europe between the Oceans, our focus is the period c.2800-140 BC. We see the rise and fall of great civilisations, and a looming clash between a Mediterranean-based superpower and the Celtic peoples of Iron Age Europe. Once again, it is the movement of people, goods, and ideas that is central to Cunliffe’s vision of Europe’s distinctive history.
In CWA 30 we reported on recent research to understand the 2,000 year old scientific instrument salvaged from a Roman ship that sank off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in the 1st century BC. Since then, Mike…
The latest exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, features a wealth of archaeology from Vani in Georgia. Nicola Upson reports.
Barry Cunliffe’s latest book represents the synthesis of half a century studying the archaeology of Europe, an achievement comparable with that of Gordon Childe in the 1930s. In this article, and in two more to follow in succeeding issues, Current Archaeology summarises his conclusions.
Britain has literally thousands of voluntary heritage societies dedicated to diverse causes. In this series we profile some of the least known and most dedicated. This month, we take a look at…
The 1st and 2nd century structures were found in the basement of Cirencester Corn Hall
Apart from his red hair, beard, giant girth and his equally gargantuan appetite for wives, the one thing we all associate with Henry VIII is the event that the authors of 1066 and All That called, with an eye for a memorable spelling mistake, ‘the Disillusion of the Monasteries’.
The mechanism was used to predict the positions of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon and possibly planetary motions.
In the early 18th century, Palladian style ruled England as the most fashionable for a British country house or public building. The man responsible, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694-1753), designed the building that started this architectural revolution. English Heritage archaeologists have recently had a rare chance to investigate Britain’s first ‘Palladian’ country house.
The Gods of the Pacific are powerful gods. Some have called them idols - more have called them art. And the Gods of the Pacific have had an enormous influence on European art throughout the 20th century. The Gods were powerful, and their power could be dangerous as well as life-enhancing. And this power had to be contained: the Polynesians had a word for the means by which this power could be contained and controlled: Tapu. Tapu means 'marked' or 'set apart': anything that was Tapu had to be wrapped and kept separate. And the word Tapu has also migrated to Europe and has become our word Taboo.
Stonehenge is merely one part of a much wider sacred landscape represented today by the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. The evidence is mounting that Stonehenge itself represented a domain of the ancestors, and, as such, a place in which the final rites were performed in elaborate ceremonies marking the passage of the recently deceased from life to death.
Athens conjures up ancient Greece and the civilisation symbolized by the fastidious re-building of the Parthenon. Yet Athens boasts possibly the most extensive remains of any Roman city in Greece. Why should this matter? Well, for the imperial Romans, Greece…
Eberhard Sauer reports on the incredible discovery of a tombstone in Alchester, Oxfordshire; and not just any tombstone, but one which could rewrite the history of the Roman invasion and conquest of Britain.
Lee Prosser, curator at Historic Royal Palaces, tells us about the archaeology of a Georgian royal palace.
There really have been so few instances when Time Team sites have yielded any evidence pertaining to children - despite having dug more than 150 sites over the 13 years the series has been running.
CWA takes a picturesque look at Japan's prehistoric Jomon Culture, encompassing their exquisite pottery, Neolithic/Mesolithic economy and ritual beliefs.
The great Neolithic temples on Malta are among the oldest temples in the world, most of them erected before even the pyramids were built. Yet what were they and how did they work? The most important and illuminating excavations of this period were those that took place at the Brochtorff’s stone circle, at Xaghra, from 1987-1994.
Around 8000 years ago a huge underwater landslide off Norway triggered a tsunami (‘tidal wave’) that wreaked destruction along the coasts of Norway, Iceland and eastern Scotland. An archaeologist considers the contemporary (Mesolithic) Scottish scene in the next article. Here geographer David E Smith describes what Quaternary scientists know as the Storegga tsunami.