The copper road
For the first time in human experience, a substance could be melted and converted into something new. If you set off by car from the Volga River to Hungary, you will have to drive for 32 hours and cover a…
Isotopes
People of the past: Building a future for Scotland’s archaeological human remains
National Museums Scotland holds one of the largest collections of archaeological human remains from Scotland. Following the creation of cutting-edge facilities to care for and study these remains, as well as the recruitment of Scotland’s first Curator of Osteoarchaeology, Jess Thompson, Matthew Knight, Kirsty Owen, Adrián Maldonado, Bethany Simpson, and Vesna Podržaj explore what excavated individuals can tell us about past populations, and consider the ethical issues surrounding such research.
Death among the Durotriges
For more than 15 years, archaeologists from Bournemouth University have been excavating a number of sites around Winterborne Kingston, near Bere Regis in Dorset. This long-running project has revolutionised our understanding of the Iron Age in this region, with discoveries…
World news
Mass graves and migration in Neolithic France Recent isotopic analysis of human remains from Neolithic mass graves found at Bergheim and Achenheim in Alsace, France, have shed new light on the life histories of these individuals. Each pit was found…
Living and Dying in a Lancashire Cotton Town
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…
Science Note: Developing a collective osteobiographical approach to cemetery analysis
In the past, most analyses of human remains have examined specific, discrete aspects of osteological data such as health, trauma, and migration. In an attempt to provide a more holistic approach to the analysis of cemeteries, researchers at the University…
What Neanderthals ate: the feasibility of using zinc isotopes as a proxy for diet
In this month’s ‘Science Notes’, we explore recent research that has tested whether zinc (Zn) isotopes could be used as a proxy for nitrogen in such cases.
Isotopes and aDNA: teasing apart ancestry versus migration in early medieval England
The previous articles in this issue have focused primarily on ancient DNA – but what can isotopic analysis add to this picture? Sam Leggett explores how this technique can complement genetic analysis, and how it illuminates the experiences of people living centuries earlier.
This week: Links of Noltland
The perfectly preserved Stone Age village of Skara Brae is perhaps Orkney's most celebrated ancient site, offering stunning proof that these northerly islands were once at the cutting edge of Neolithic civilisation. But Skara Brae was only inhabited from about 3200 to 2200 BC – after which date, according to the traditional view, Orkney's fortunes slipped into a decline from which they were slow to recover.
Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries: kinship, community, and identity
It has been more than two decades since Sam Lucy’s seminal book The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death, and in the intervening years new cemeteries, methodologies, and mortuary archaeology theory have advanced to the point that we are due a sequel.…
Ipswich’s medieval population investigated
In 2012, an extensive excavation was carried out in the Stoke Quay area of Ipswich by Oxford Archaeology and Pre-Construct Archaeology. Covering an area of 1.2ha, the project was a major undertaking and made finds spanning the early medieval period…