Defending the Demetae I enjoyed the fascinating feature on the wonderful Halberton Roman villa in CA 438. By a happy coincidence, the day before, I had visited Carmarthenshire Museum, which has recently renovated its galleries, including the Roman display for…
Recent archaeological investigations at the Bronze Age site of Haughey’s Fort – next to the famous Navan Fort, an Iron Age monument in County Armagh, Northern Ireland (see CA 406) – have revealed new details about the complex, demonstrating that…
Caves have always captured the imagination. This is no less true of High Pasture Cave on the Isle of Skye, whose publication represents the latest contribution to a growing corpus in British cave archaeology. Nestled under the slopes of the…
REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH The Altai region of western Mongolia has long been considered marginal in broader Eurasian archaeological narratives. In this book, William Fitzhugh and Richard Kortum build a compelling case for the region’s centrality in the evolution of…
REVIEW BY RICHARD BRADLEY Archaeologists study memories in prehistory and help to create them in the present. Ancient people must have had a sense of the past, just as we do today. That is why older monuments were visited and…
Investigating the hinterland of a timber henge in Germany has revealed a remarkable prehistoric landscape. Franziska Knoll shares the findings from an intriguing concentration of ritual monuments and settlement.
Excavations in Derbyshire have revealed that an apparently solitary standing stone in Farley Wood is in fact part of a larger ceremonial complex dating to the early Bronze Age. Standing 2m (6.6ft) tall, the upright was long believed to be…
Recent investigations on the slopes of Pen y Foel, and a wider survey of its surrounding landscape, have shed new light on a previously undocumented
dolmen and other later prehistoric monuments. Mike Woods, Arwyn Owen, and George Nash take up the story of a long-forgotten and recently rediscovered ritualised landscape.
New interdisciplinary research from the University of Aberdeen has suggested that Holme I – a Bronze Age timber circle in north Norfolk that is also known as ‘Seahenge’ – was created as a response to a period of climatic deterioration.…
Archaeological surveys in the Carangas region of highland Bolivia have identified a previously unrecognised concentration of religious sites built by the pre-Hispanic inhabitants of the area, including one site with characteristics currently unique in the Andes. The survey identified 135…
Archaeological work ahead of a new housing development in Northamptonshire has revealed hints of possibly ceremonial activity spanning 2,000 years. Carly Hilts reports.
I would restore the great chambers of Boyne, prepare a sepulchre under the cupmarked stones. Seamus Heaney, ‘Funeral Rites’
The site, known as La Torre- La Janera, covers an area of c.600ha near the Guadiana River in the province of Huelva.
Archaeological investigations in a field outside Norwich, close to the remains of a Romano-Celtic temple, have uncovered further evidence of activity associated with the religious complex. Carly Hilts reports on a recent visit to the site.
Review by George Nash. Throughout prehistoric Europe, there are significant areas where rock art was commissioned, executed, consumed, and abandoned. One of these is southern Scandinavia. Here, during the later prehistoric period, ancient artists provided a sometimes- cryptic insight into…
This represents a rare find for the area: the only other known Cornish henge monument with a stone circle is Stripple Stones on Bodmin Moor.
Excavations on a hill in the Yorkshire Wolds have uncovered the remains of a 24m2 Iron Age shrine packed with cow skulls, deer antler, and other animal bones. The site appeared as crop marks in aerial photographs taken over 20…
On its recovery, the idol was taken to University College Dublin for an extensive three-year conservation project.
The archaeology of Rapa Nui is dominated by the Easter Island heads, but these were just one element of larger ceremonial complexes. Colin Richards explores some distinctive houses, which offer tantalising clues for understanding the celebrated statues.
It is believed that the pyramid’s creation was connected to the TBJ eruption as volcanoes and mountains were sacred to the Maya. The structure may have served some kind of religious function, perhaps it was even intended to guard against future eruptions.
One of the essentials of building a megalithic chambered burial monument is the choice of materials used to construct it. It is now considered that stone (boulders, stone erratics and fragments, and quarried stone) used in the construction of megaliths was…
On the strength of stylistic comparisons, researchers have dated the feline to around 200 BC.
Few archaeologists had even heard of the Thornborough henges until 2002, when a local campaigning group started to kick up a fuss about gravel- and sand-extraction in the vicinity of the monuments. Now Thornborough is routinely described as ‘the Stonehenge of the north’. As Chris Catling reports, a decade of research has transformed our understanding of one of the most important monuments of its kind in Europe.