A couple of recent press comments about new discoveries have caught my attention because of what they reveal about the way academics build their careers and how archaeological field projects get turned into stories about the past. Basically it comes down to this – archaeologists want their site to be the discovery that will rock…
archaeological news
archaeology of the contemporary past
The Newcastle Journal has run an article about the WWII remains I mentioned in connection with the landscape archaeology around Dunstanburgh Castle in the UK. The two concrete radar buildings still survive and there is clear evidence of where equipment was sited. The remains of the Nissen huts behind the radar station, which accommodated the…
Dunstanburgh, Northumberland
English Heritage, the government agency reponsible for managing the historic environment in the UK, has posted a web diary of a fascinating survey done last November of Dunstanburgh Castle in the north of England. [Link] This is one of my favorite places. I have been visiting, photographing, teaching and writing about it for as long…
obsessions with who did it first
“Early human marks are ‘symbols’” – a BBC report headline today. A series of parallel lines engraved in an animal bone between 1.4 and 1.2 million years ago may be the earliest example of human symbolic behaviour. University of Bordeaux experts say no practical process, such as butchering a carcass, can explain the markings. But…
archaeological rats
There is a small exhibition on at the British Museum of a grave dating from the late third millennium/early second. The grave of a man dating to around 2,300BC was discovered three miles from Stonehenge by Wessex Archaeology staff in May 2002. His grave was the richest from this period (the early Bronze Age) ever…
Phluzein
Anders Bell at Phluzein has pointed out that his blog has no affliation with the Cotsen Institute. I had made the association through the RSS feed, so I went to have a proper look. It’s quite a nice miscellany about various archaeological news items.