REVIEW BY OSCAR MORO ABADIA This publication was created to accompany the British Museum Partnership Exhibition Ice Age art now, held at Cliffe Castle Museum in summer 2025. The exhibition showcased the British Museum’s remarkable collection of Pleistocene mobiliary art…
REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH Given the severity of the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is no surprise that the rich prehistoric archaeology of the country has been largely forgotten, especially within its southern and eastern regions, but it makes this…
Analysis of engraved stone slabs from the 15,800-year-old site of Gönnersdorf, located on the banks of the Rhine in west-central Germany, has identified a set of carvings that appear to depict fish nets or traps. Gönnersdorf has produced a rich…
He told us that he was a speleologist, whose girlfriend had just left him. He was in a very sorry state of distress.
Analysis of human and animal footprints carved into rock faces in Namibia has revealed that they contain a wealth of hidden details. Engravings of human and animal tracks are found in prehistoric rock art around the world, but these images…
A rare example of Upper Palaeolithic portable art has been found at an open-air site in south-eastern France. Bellegarde, located between Nîmes and Arles, was discovered in 2015 by Inrap archaeologists. Excavations across c.2,000m2 of the multi-phase site have produced…
More still to uncover at Pompeii While investigations at Pompeii have been ongoing for centuries, much of the site remains unexplored, and new excavations have recently begun in one such previously unexamined section. This new project aims to uncover an…
The motifs found on the panel include quadrupeds (possibly bovids and equids), as well as circles, zigzags, lines, reticulates, stelliforms (suns and/or stars), and more.
Thousands of engraved owl-shaped plaques have been discovered in Copper Age tombs and pits throughout the Iberian Peninsula.
The research focused on a collection of 50 limestone plaquettes from the rock-shelter site of Montastruc in southern France, which was occupied in the Magdalenian period (23,000-14,000 years ago).
In the 1970s, prehistoric rock art was found in the Tagus River Basin, just as a dam project was set to raise water levels. In a race against time, archaeologists sought to find a way to record thousands of images before they were submerged. Now the results have been carefully studied using a variety of new technological approaches. Sara Garcês and George Nash tell the remarkable story of one of Europe’s principal rock-art areas.
Back in the days when I was an undergraduate, I was introduced to the mystical world of social theory. My tutors – Christopher Tilley and, later, Michael Shanks – introduced me to an obscure branch of archaeology that I had…
Cave painting is one of the earliest forms of human culture, one of the first outlets of our creativity. But the meaning that these paintings had to the communities who created them remains a bit of a mystery. Who painted…
Archaeologists excavating a 15,000-year-old campsite at Les Varines, Jersey, have recovered ten fragments of stone decorated with hundreds of interweaving lines. Recently published analysis of these ‘plaquettes’ suggests that they may represent the earliest artworks yet identified in the British Isles. Carly Hilts reports.