Feature

Rolling stones

From the Preseli Hills of Wales to the site of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain is 120 miles as the crow flies. That is quite some distance for the young farmers of Neolithic Wales to transport the bluestones that make up the inner circle at the Wiltshire monument. During April 2024, Professor Keith Ray of Cardiff University took two weeks to walk from west Wales to Stonehenge, accompanied by a series of archaeologists and anthropologists (a different one or two each day) to look at the landscape and consider the challenges facing the stone-bearers. Among them were CA’s editor Carly Hilts and Chris Catling, who now reports.

Roman villas in Limburg: The rise and fall of a prosperous farming community

Around 20 Roman villas have been excavated in the Limburg region of the Netherlands. The heyday for this work came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when a succession of sites was investigated with antiquarian zeal. Now fresh research in the field, archives, and find stores is shedding intriguing new light on these villa estates and their inhabitants, as Jasper de Bruin told Matthew Symonds.

D-Day, 80 years on

In our two-part special for this issue to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, David Porter examines the planning and logistical operation that ensured Allied success, while Patrick Mercer follows three British units to understand what 6th June 1944 was really for those at the point of the spear.

A man of destiny

In the second part of our series on Britain’s rise as a naval power, Graham Goodlad explains how supremacy at sea became closely linked with the 18th-century career of Admiral Edward Vernon.

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A wonder of the world: Wandering along London’s post-medieval waterfront

What can the combination of archaeology, documents, maps, and plans tell us about London’s port in the period between the Great Fire of 1666 and the shift of shipping activity downstream of the City, following the opening of the West India Dock in 1801? A new and highly readable publication brings together the evidence from four sites excavated by the Museum of London between 1974 and 1984, allowing us an insight into the area around London Bridge when it served as the focal point of London’s commercial waterfront. Chris Catling reports.

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Smallhythe Place: Romans, royal ships, and a rural retreat

Smallhythe Place, a National Trust property in Kent, is home to a picturesque timber-framed house with enigmatic origins, while the surrounding landscape preserves unique traces of a medieval shipbuilding centre that served several kings. Over the last three years, a team of more than 100 archaeologists have excavated 21 trenches to help bring the site’s story to light once more.

Visualising Venta Belgarum: Touring prehistoric, Roman, and post-Roman Winchester

Pioneering excavations in Winchester in the 1960s and 1970s made a major contribution to the development of modern archaeological practice and trained many of those who subsequently became the leading professional and academic archaeologists of our day. So the publication of the latest Winchester Studies volume – a concise synthesis of the city’s prehistoric, Roman, and post-Roman development – is a landmark event, as Chris Catling reports.

The Tomio Maruyama: Discovering the longest sword and largest mirror in ancient Japan

In January 2023, the finds from excavations within the Tomio Maruyama burial mound in Nara city caused a media sensation. For the second in a two-part series examining Japanese tombs, Simon Kaner travelled to Nara and caught up with Okabayashi Kosaku, recently retired Deputy Director of the Nara Prefectural Kashihara Archaeological Institute, to find out more about the discovery and see how the story is developing.

Mapping histories: Recent fieldwork at Jebel Hafeet

An international team of archaeologists specialising in early prehistory has undertaken pioneering survey work in and around one of the tallest mountains in the United Arab Emirates. George Nash, Genevieve von Petzinger, Aitor Ruiz, Juan F Ruiz López, and Yamandu Hilbert explain how their work unfolded and what they discovered.

Zimingzhong: The mechanical marvels where East meets West

A remarkable trade between Europe and China developed in the 1700s, when an emperor with a passion for science started collecting extravagant mechanical timepieces. The results are both beautiful to behold and steeped in a meeting of skills and cultures between East and West, as Jane Desborough told Matthew Symonds.

D-Day: Before the storm

The decisive victory of World War II in Western Europe took place 80 years ago this summer. On 6 June 1944, after months of planning, around 150,000 men from five divisions – two American, two British, and one Canadian —…