Recently published research from one of the largest cemetery excavations of its type outside London has shed vivid light on the experiences of almost 2,000 men, women, and children who lived and died in Lancashire around 200 years ago. Carly Hilts spoke to Julie Franklin to learn more.
What was life like in Britain 3,000 years ago? How did people live together, find their food and materials, and organise their domestic rituals and day-to-day activities? The Bronze Age to Early Iron Age settlement of Cladh Hallan in the Outer Hebrides has provided answers, as well as new questions, as Mike Parker Pearson, Jacqui Mulville, Helen Smith, and Peter Marshall explain.
Vampires and zombies are not just the fictional creation of 19th-century novelists, nor modern film directors and creators of computer games – John Blair’s new book, Killing the Dead, shows that there is a long history of belief in the ability of the dead to leave their graves and cause harm to the living. Making sure this cannot happen results in extraordinary burial practices, as Chris Catling reports.
There are lots of great ways to get involved with history and archaeology over the next few months, including exhibitions, lectures, and conferences exploring a wide range of subjects. If you would prefer to get your heritage fix from the comfort of your sofa, though, there is a variety of resources on offer online, too, from virtual site tours and digital offerings by museums to podcasts, TV shows, and more. Kathryn Krakowka has put together a selection of some of the options.
Bronze Age hoards tend to be found in watery locations – rivers, lochs, bogs – where they are routinely interpreted as ritual votive deposits. Two recently published examples, however, discovered 150 miles apart in Scotland, came from contemporary Bronze Age settlements. Rachel Buckley explains what micro-excavation of their strikingly different contents has revealed about why these collections may have been buried 3,000 years ago.
Folk memory, songs, place names, and oral histories are being deployed by the Somerset Eel Recovery Project (SERP) in its work to bring this critically endangered species back to the Somerset Levels. Those stories and songs are a reminder that the Levels once teemed with eels.
What have archaeological experiments revealed about how stone axes were sourced, made, and used thousands of years ago? James Dilley highlights some of the key findings.
In the previous few columns I have explored some of the great towns of Roman Britain – so, as a change of pace, here I will begin a new mini-series on the country’s great prehistoric sites. I will commence this month with a series of locations in Norfolk and Suffolk.
The latest on acquisitions, exhibitions, and key decisions.
the modernist society (the lack of capitals is deliberate, in line with the modernist philosophy of embracing innovation and seeking freedom from traditional forms and established rules) is the meeting place for all those who are interested in the often-derided…
REVIEW BY KK Encapsulated within this volume are the published proceedings of the conference held in 2020 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project (SHARP) – but it is so much more than a…
REVIEW BY NEIL HOLBROOK It is always instructive to look at the areas surrounding famous archaeological sites, as they can provide valuable context for the well-known remains. So it is with Silchester in Hampshire, where a late Iron Age oppidum…
REVIEW BY ALEXANDRA SANMARK This book is a welcome addition to our knowledge about Viking Age and Norse colonisation and settlement in the Hebrides, and provides the first overview of this time period in western Scotland. The book is structured…
REVIEW BY ADAM KLUPS Luke Sherlock’s Forgotten Churches is a visually rich and thoughtfully curated tribute to England’s sacred spaces. As a long-time follower of Sherlock’s Instagram account @englishpilgrim, I was intrigued to discover the familiar aesthetic now transformed into…
REVIEW BY CARLY AMEEN This fifth volume in the ‘Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World’ series exemplifies contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship. The editors, Maren Clegg Hyer and Gale R Owen-Crocker, have assembled contributions that seamlessly weave evidence from archaeology, history, art…
REVIEW BY CH For this collection of 34 poems imagining western England’s prehistoric and Roman pasts, Slow Migrations is a fitting title. Many of the works within – inspired by the Corinium Museum in Cirencester and the Roman Baths at…
Roman Morris Having just received the latest issue of Current Archaeology, I placed it on our recently purchased tablecloth, the pattern of which is based on the ‘Blackthorn’ design by William Morris. As can be seen in the photo (above),…
This ornate artefact is known as the Mold Cape. Thought to date to c.1900 1600 BC, it is one of the finest examples of prehistoric sheet gold-working yet found in Britain, crafted from a single ingot, which was shaped and…
This Birdlip brooch was found by a metal-detectorist near Catterton in North Yorkshire this past June, and is believed to date between the late Iron Age and early Roman period. Birdlip, or Beaked Bow, brooches date from between 30 BC…
Lead isotopes have frequently been used in archaeology to determine the provenance of metal objects. More recently, they have also been helping to assess mobility in humans and other animals. This form of analysis is still in its infancy, however,…
New dendrochronological evidence has provided a minimum age for the tree that used to grow at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall before it was illegally felled in September 2023. It was not previously known how long the sycamore had been…
A new study, which was recently published in Antiquity, has examined a sediment core from a palaeochannel of the River Ure, near Aldborough in North Yorkshire, and combined it with both historical and archaeological evidence in order to discern how…
New research – using the largest multi-isotope dataset of animal remains yet generated in archaeology – has shown that communities in southern Britain had diverse ways of organising feasts during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.…
Carved stone head found at Skaill Farm dig An excavation at Skaill Farm on Rousay, Orkney, has uncovered an unusual carved stone head. Found by Katie Joss, an undergraduate from the UHI Archaeology Institute, which is leading the investigation, the…
Excavations at Old Park, on the eastern outskirts of Canterbury in Kent, have revealed further evidence of occupation of the site by ancient hominin species. These new discoveries have dated the earliest lithic layers to between 712,000-621,000 years ago –…
Excavations in Guardbridge, along the Eden Estuary in Fife, have revealed a rich landscape of archaeological features spanning the late Upper Palaeolithic through to the modern day. Conducted between 2019 and 2021 – and recently published on Archaeology Reports Online…
Large Iron Age settlement found in Czechia Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a large settlement dating to between the 3rd and 1st century BC in the Hradec Králové region of north-east Bohemia, Czechia. First discovered in 2023 during investigations…
Increasingly, archaeologists are concerned with the here and now. This is evident in a new study, led by researchers from the University of York, which has examined how our discipline can deal with modern materials. In particular, they consider the…