hunter-gatherers

Bacon Hole: Rediscovering Britain’s forgotten Ice Age cave art

Hidden within the limestone cliffs of the Gower Peninsula in South Wales is a cave that has witnessed dramatic changes in climate, landscape, and human history. Bacon Hole, overlooking what is today the Bristol Channel, is home to one of the most intriguing and controversial stories in British prehistoric archaeology. It is a story that began more than a century ago with the discovery of possible Ice Age paintings, continued through decades of doubt, and has now been reopened through modern scientific investigation. George Nash explains.

Bad Camberg

World News

Earliest evidence of Yersinia pestis? As DNA analysis of human remains continues to expand, evidence is mounting that Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, has been ravaging human populations for millennia. Now a new study has identified the…

Africa’s oldest cremation

Archaeological investigations by an international team of researchers have unearthed the earliest evidence for intentional human cremation in Africa. Around 9,500 years ago, a community of hunter-gatherers gathered more than 30kg of wood and grass to build a large funeral…

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Early Neolithic Cultural exchange

Archaeological work at Eilsleben, in northern Germany, has uncovered unexpected evidence of connections between the early farmers living at this site and the pre-existing hunter-gatherer communities of the region. Eilsleben was discovered in the 1970s and has since undergone extensive…

Seeing red

A few years ago, Sarah Paris – then a graduate student at Cambridge University – asked if she could access the human skeletons from Khok Phanom Di in order to study the mortuary use of red ochre. I excavated this great Neolithic site in 1985, and I willingly agreed. Last year, she completed her doctoral dissertation and at the last Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand, she won the prize for the best presentation by a graduate student.

Transport, technology, and trade

Parallel tracks have been found in fossilised mud at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, USA, and interpreted as the marks left by a travois: a timber frame used by Native Americans for transporting goods. Particularly associated with Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains region of North America, a travois is made by joining two long poles and a third shorter one to create an A-shaped frame.

Mesolithic mariners

Malta is one of the most remote archipelagos in the Mediterranean, located almost 100km from the nearest landmass, Sicily. For many years, it was thought that European hunter-gatherers were unable or unwilling to travel to such remote islands; on Malta,…

The art of fishing

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…

Star Carr: Excavating the CA archive

After more than 50 columns exploring the archaeology of the British Isles through a geographic lens, I begin here a new thematic focus: that of ‘great’ sites visited by Current Archaeology down the years. As I neared the end of my tour of the four nations, I reflected on the enduring power of a ‘great’ site.

The Channel Islands: Excavating the CA archive

Since March 2020 I have criss-crossed the United Kingdom, examining its history through the eyes of Current Archaeology. I have now visited every county in every country, but I have just a few geographical loose ends to tie off, including, this month, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

Finding Eden and fighting extinction

In the complex story of human migration out of Africa, Homo sapiens are believed to have travelled steadily eastwards to Asia – eventually reaching Australia by around 50,000 years ago – but seem not to have moved into Europe for a period of 20,000 years.

Living in the Ice Age

Living in the Ice Age

REVIEW BY AB What was life like for the inhabitants of Europe in the last Ice Age? How did they make their clothes? Did children play with toys? What was their relationship with dogs? These are just some of the…

Wolf Road

Wolf Road

REVIEW BY KK Wolf Road is Alice Roberts’ first foray into children’s literature. Drawing on archaeological and anthropological evidence, the book tries to provide as accurate a window as possible into the world of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, and into how they…

Excavation reveals Larkhall’s prehistoric past

Recently published research has revealed that the location of a new housing development in Larkhall in South Lanarkshire was already popular in prehistory. The discoveries were made during archaeological excavations undertaken by GUARD Archaeology prior to the construction of new…

Early beaver hunting

Beaver remains at a site in central Germany are changing our understanding of the diets of hominins in Lower Palaeolithic Europe, as well as the antiquity of the exploitation of beavers. Extensive excavations between 1969 and 2002 at Bilzingsleben, an…

Shark-tooth blades

What are they?  Each of these two modified tiger shark teeth was once part of a handled knife. They were found in contexts dated to 7,000-5,000 years ago, associated with the Toalean culture, hunter-gatherers who lived in south-western Sulawesi, Indonesia,…

BLB5 Excavation of 'structure'

Built to last: Extraordinary ancient architecture at Kalambo Falls

In 2019, excavations at Kalambo Falls in Zambia produced a range of wooden objects. These included structural elements that have been dated using cutting-edge technology to an almost unbelievably ancient era. The results force us to rethink everything we thought we knew about the capabilities of early humans, as Larry Barham and Geoff Duller told Matthew Symonds.

Below Extensive excavations at Beidaling in Guangxi have uncovered flexed human burials and a massive stone tool workshop.

Affluent hunters

Ever since the redoubtable Madeleine Colani explored the wonderful karst country of Hoa Binh Province, west of Hanoi in northern Vietnam, a century ago, the hunter-gatherers of Southeast Asia have received rather a poor press. With a background in the…

Life on an Alaskan lakeshore

Excavations at a site in Alaska have uncovered an ancestral Alutiiq house frozen in time by a fire 3,000 years ago, complete with rarely preserved woven grass mats on the floor. The Nunallerpiaq site sits on the shore of Karluk…

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This week: The Neolithic

If the past is a foreign country – as the novelist L.P. Hartley famously suggested in the opening line to The Go-Between (1953) – then prehistory is surely a whole other world entirely. With little physical evidence often to guide…