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…
An infant who died at birth during the fourth Bronze Age phase was interred with a hen’s egg over the left hand; perhaps the infant was holding it when placed in the grave. What better symbol can be found for the regeneration of life itself than an egg?
Boris Johnson is not, of course, the first political leader to take a dim view of the free movement of people and goods between Britain and the Continent. More than 2,000 years earlier, Julius Caesar ordered the destruction of ships…
Over the last decade, revolutions in the scientific analysis of archaeological material have allowed us to delve deeper into the origins and migrations of modern humans. Through the lens of Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary…
Around 12,000 years ago, the course of human history changed forever when hunter-gatherer communities in western Asia made a dramatic lifestyle change, switching from foraging to farming. It was the beginning of the Neolithic revolution: a cultural phenomenon that swept…
Barry Cunliffe’s latest book represents the synthesis of half a century studying the archaeology of Europe, an achievement comparable with that of Gordon Childe in the 1930s. In this article, and in two more to follow in succeeding issues, Current Archaeology summarises his conclusions.