A second excavation season at Buckler’s Hard, a private ship- building hub on the River Beaulieu, 12 miles (20km) south of Southampton in the New Forest, has fully revealed the wooden slipway where 55 ships for the Royal Navy –…
Sculpting southern Scotland A new project, coordinated by Dr Christina Cowart-Smith and funded by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, is set to start this autumn with the aim of documenting around 200 fragments of sculpture south of the Forth–Clyde…
Mining is rooted in Cornish heritage and woven into the fabric of Cornwall’s historic landscape, and so it seems fitting, as we mark the 20th anniversary year of the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape becoming a UNESCO World Heritage…
The Archaeology of Industrial Cheshire in 20 Digs is a well-illustrated introduction to Cheshire’s industrial past. Each concise chapter combines documentary evidence with excavation results to trace the development of the county’s key industries across two millennia. The book opens…
A new project is examining the traces of Roman mining associated with extracting
a particularly prized stone. Guillermo León, Catalina Urquijo, Dionisio Urbína,
José Luis Córdoba, and the spelunkers of the Cuenca Ara Club of Speleology describe the demands of archaeological investigation deep within the bowels of central Spain.
This month sees a return of the Council for British Archaeology’s annual Festival
of Archaeology, with a wealth of in-person and online events taking place across
the UK in July and August. The theme for 2026 is ‘Archaeology and Nature’.
Here is a selection of regional highlights; for more details of each (including
prices and booking information, where relevant), and to explore the full programme, see www.archaeologyuk.org/festival.html.
The recent excavation of a clandestine stone bothy at Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve (NNR) has uncovered a rare piece of a copper still, providing concrete proof that the site was once used for illegal whisky production. The investigation was…
A second season of excavations at Bodiam Castle in Sussex has revealed extensive evidence of a Roman presence, with tiles and pottery confirming that the site was home to a port for the Classis Britannica – the Roman naval fleet…
Currently home to the National Museum of Flight, RAF East Fortune near Edinburgh is one of the UK’s best-preserved Second World War airfields. Re-examination of finds from previous excavations, on the site, as well as new evidence from recent field observations, has shed light on its long military history, as Dr Matteo Randazzo and Olivia Jones report.
The watering hole found near Gloucester is not the only reworked water source recently discovered in England. Excavations in advance of a new Rolls-Royce extension site at Goodwood, near Chichester in West Sussex, have revealed evidence of a thriving Iron…
Excavations at the former Hafod–Morfa Copperworks have revealed rare evidence of copper-processing techniques used in the Lower Swansea Valley during the 19th century which, at its peak, accounted for an extraordinary amount of the world’s copper production. The Hafod Copperworks…
During World War II, a number of German armament factories were relocated underground as a result of Allied air raids. In August 1944, a work detail of the Buchenwald concentration camp was established near the village of Walbeck, in the…
Workshops from the Late Period and early Ptolemaic era have been discovered by an Egyptian-Italian (University of Padua) team working at the interconnected Kom al-Ahmar and Kom Wasit sites in the Western Delta (Beheira Governorate). The workshops consist of at…
Last month’s column explored prehistoric mines, and this month I will follow up on the topic by visiting medieval and modern examples that have been examined in past issues of CA. The range is wide: from Welsh slate to English coal, and from salt in the Midlands to tin in the south-west.
Excavations by York Archaeology on the site of a former hospital at Clifton Ings have shed light on the institution’s origins as a Victorian asylum, offering insights into how approaches to mental health care have changed over the centuries. Anne Jenner and Katherine Bradshaw report.
Saving literary homes and cooling towers Chris Catling’s piece about threats to literary homes (CA 431) is nothing new to those of us in Derby. In 1906, we lost the birthplace of Joseph Wright ARA (1734-1797) – replaced by a…
The discovery of the largest number of whetstones ever found at a single site in north-west Europe has illuminated a Roman industrial hub that once operated beside the River Wear in Offerton, near Sunderland. The site was discovered and excavated…
Reviled when they were first constructed, cooling towers are now admired for their gracious hyperboloid curves and sculptural presence, just as they are about to disappear from the landscape. The Twentieth Century Society has described the group of eight towers…
Football fact-checking It was good to see some football archaeology being reported in CA 429 (‘Cathkin Park commemorated’). However, the article is misleading when it says that after Queen’s Park moved in 1903 ‘the stadium became disused’. Founder member of…
REVIEW BY BRANDON BRAUN The Latin motto for Shropshire – Floreat Salopia, ‘may Shropshire flourish’ – has been used since at least the 17th century, so it is a fitting title for the 100th volume of the Transactions of the…
REVIEW BY REBECCA GOWLAND The town of Blackburn in Lancashire was a key player in Britain’s industrial cotton boom, which saw a quadrupling of its inhabitants during the first half of the 19th century. This volume presents the results of…
Excavations along the disused Tranent–Cockenzie Waggonway have revealed a section of the historic rail route and uncovered new details about its use and construction that could potentially alter our understanding of railway innovations. The Tranent–Cockenzie Waggonway was the first railway…
Excavations on the National Trust’s Attingham Estate in Shropshire have uncovered the remains of a Roman industrial complex and shrine, adding to our knowledge of the early northern fringes of Viroconium Cornoviorum (Wroxeter). A comprehensive geophysical and metal-detecting survey was…
New project to study ‘bog bodies’ A new project, entitled ‘Bog Biographies’ and led by researchers at Coventry University, is aiming to improve understanding of the Iron Age phenomenon of ‘bog bodies’. This period appears to have seen a significant…
To mark 200 years since the Stockton and Darlington Railway – the world’s first modern railway – opened on 27 September 1825, Historic England have announced seven new listings relating to railway heritage sites across the country. Four stations have…
An Egyptian team excavating the Wadi el-Nasab site in south Sinai has discovered a copper-smelting and -casting workshop with administrative buildings at what was one of the most important ancient mining centres. Copper ingots of different sizes and shapes were…
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.
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…
A well-worn joke goes that archaeologists find their careers in ruins. This is sometimes literally true: at least since the 1970s, and in cities on all inhabited continents, crises sparked by deindustrialisation, decay, and dereliction have been an assured portent of large-scale excavations. It is not just that when business goes down, archaeology goes in.
A massive mud-brick enclosure wall has been found near Karnak by an Egyptian team working at Nagaa Abu Asba. Blocks from the wall bear stamps with the name of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty king Menkheperra Necho I (c.672-664 BC). The team…
Finding lost farmsteads I was intrigued by the article on South Yorkshire (‘Fields and farmsteads’, CA 424) and the reference to the absence of evidence of farming and occupation of the area between the late 10th century and the 16th/17th centuries…
Recent excavations at Tell Abu Saifi in the Qantara region (Ismailia) have revealed new military architecture at the site of two fortresses dating back to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Located in the northern Sinai Desert, the ‘Fortress of the…
The system whereby coal was heated and the resulting gases purified, stored, and distributed to factories, street lamps, public buildings, and, in due course, to every home was developed in the UK in the first decade of the 19th century and exported around the world. Today the 600 remaining gasholders, once familiar industrial structures in every city and town, are being recorded by Historic England prior to being dismantled or converted to other uses, as Chris Catling reports.
Formed in 1975 (and thus celebrating its first half-century this year), the Fortress Study Group (FSG) is devoted to the study and preservation of artillery fortifications. While early examples of these structures are found in Norwich and Southampton, it was…
An Egyptian team has completed a two-year project to excavate a 3,000 year-old gold-processing centre found on the site of the modern Sukari gold mine, near Marsa Alam on the Red Sea coast. The complex consisted of grinding and pulverising…
An exceptionally well-preserved example of a 15th-/16th-century pottery kiln has been excavated at Sutton V.A. Primary School in Bedfordshire. The large, well-built kiln was discovered by Albion Archaeology. It retains its stoke-hole, floor, and flues, offering a rare opportunity to…