Archaeology as immersive historical simulation
When I began studying archaeology nearly 70 years ago, my professor illustrated his lectures with the aid of glass slides projected through an antediluvian machine known as an epidiascope
palaeoenvironment
From Coast to Fen: archaeology in a dynamic landscape, the archaeology of the Triton Knoll Electrical System, Lincolnshire
REVIEW BY JONATHAN LAST Cable routes and similar projects are a challenge to archaeologists because their narrow footprints are not necessarily representative of the broad landscapes they pass through. Yet they often offer glimpses into areas little touched by other…
Blazing a trail: Earliest evidence of humans making fire discovered in Suffolk
Excavations at East Farm, Barnham, have uncovered the oldest-known traces of deliberate fire-making – a game-changing step in the human story that we now know took place 350,000 years earlier than was previously thought. Carly Hilts reports.
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…
Assessing Iron Age Marsh-Forts
Review by Ian Ralston The subtitle to this volume – ‘with reference to the stratigraphy and palaeoenvironment surrounding The Berth’ – indicates clearly its main objective: detailed consideration of the environs of the Shropshire fort, the subject of several small-scale…
Stranger in the Mask of a Deer
‘Dreamer, can you cast your mind back to before you were islanded?’ This thoughtful and thought-provoking book-length poem is described by its author, Richard Skelton, as a ‘call-and-response from the present to the past’. The text drifts into a dream-like…
The Storegga disaster: in search of squashed Mesolithic people
Around 8000 years ago a huge underwater landslide off Norway triggered a tsunami (‘tidal wave’) that wreaked destruction along the coasts of Norway, Iceland and eastern Scotland. An archaeologist considers the contemporary (Mesolithic) Scottish scene in the next article. Here geographer David E Smith describes what Quaternary scientists know as the Storegga tsunami.