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Megaliths of the World: Volume I

REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH The burial monumentality associated with the Neolithic is very much a global phenomenon. This desire to bury the dead in an artificial cave covered with an earthen or cairn mound occurs over at least six millennia.…

Ancient mounds in America

In the middle of Louisiana State University’s campus stand two earthen mounds, each c.5.5m tall. The LSU Campus Mounds have long been known to be among the c.800 mounds created by ancient indigenous communities in this region, but archaeological investigations…

Right Effigy pipe of seated male figure, known as Resting Warrior or Big Boy, and identified as Morning Star or the hero Red Horn, from the Spirit Lodge, Spiro. Bauxite (flint clay), AD 1100 1200. Size: c.25 x 15 x 15cm

Spiro: renewing the world

Vast quantities of artefacts were found in a mound in Oklahoma in the 1930s. Together they tell an intriguing story of ritual and cosmic renewal. As an exhibition reuniting some of these objects travels to Texas, Lucia Marchini speaks to Michelle Rich and Eric Singleton to find out more.

Spiro

This week: Spiro Mounds

It was considered one of the finds of the century, when – at the height of the Great Depression of the 1930s – a group of American prospectors calling themselves the Pocola Mining Company uncovered a burial chamber in eastern Oklahoma that had remained undisturbed for more than 500 years.

Above Ralph Fiennes as Basil Brown, Carey Mulligan as Edith Pretty, and Archie Barnes as her son Robert, at the recreated Sutton Hoo mound in The Dig. right Ben Chaplin and Lily James play archaeologists Stuart and Peggy Piggott.

A Riveting Tale

Netflix has just released The Dig, a major film about the Sutton Hoo excavation. Lindsay Fulcher unearths the story of how Basil Brown uncovered the splendid Anglo-Saxon ship burial and illuminated the so-called ‘Dark Ages’.