Items found during an archaeological dig near Stornoway have revealed people lived there thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
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June 20, 2022
May 31, 2022
A Bronze Age hoard of axes, spear and bracelet fragments dating back to about 1,000 BC have been declared treasure.
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May 21, 2022
The prehistoric tribes that built Stonehenge likely “feasted” on the raw organs of cattle, scientists believe.
May 19, 2022
A rare Bronze Age spearhead has been found by workers while developing a wetland in Gloucestershire.
Experts discovered it at Cirencester Sewage Works, near South Cerney, earlier this year and on 10 May estimated it is about 3,500 years old.
Archaeologists said it appeared to be a family heirloom that was placed into a pit for a reason unknown.
Other items unearthed include a selection of prehistoric pottery fragments and flint tools.
A previously unknown stone circle has been found inside a Cornwall scheduled monument, a conservation group says.
The underground circle has been found inside Castilly Henge, near Bodmin, by Historic England (HE) and the Cornwall Archaeology Unit.
It was found during the site’s first modern archaeological survey to better understand the area, HE said.
The site has now been fenced, allowing it to be grazed by animals without damaging the structure, it added.
The henge is one of 40 scheduled monuments protected by the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
May 13, 2022
Police are investigating damage to one of Scotland’s most important prehistoric houses, which is more than 2,000 years old, after stones were reportedly removed from the remaining structure and used to build a cairn nearby.
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May 11, 2022
Graffiti carved on ancient standing stones on the island of Arran is a heritage crime, Historic Environment Scotland has said.
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May 9, 2022
A hoard of 17 Iron Age coins has been declared treasure trove by a coroner.
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May 6, 2022
Work is under way on a replica Iron Age roundhouse on a large Bronze Age causeway dating back 3,500 years.
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May 2, 2022
Some of the country’s leading archaeologists have spent the week on top of one of the south of Scotland’s most iconic hills.
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April 19, 2022
Via Facebook, report and images of damage (presumably fire) at the Cnoc An Tursa. :-(
facebook.com/photo?fbid=386260970177129&set=pcb.386261190177107
April 7, 2022
Megalith enthusiast who did much to further understanding of the Calanais stone circle and other ancient sites of the Isle of Lewis
Mike Pitts
When Julian Cope, the musician and antiquary, met Margaret Curtis on the Isle of Lewis in the 1990s, he was impressed. Curtis, who has died aged 80, was a “living legend” and a “psychic queen”, said Cope, who filled him with “a real sense of awe”. He devoted a chapter in his bestselling 1998 book The Modern Antiquarian to her and to Calanais, one of the most extraordinary ancient monuments in Europe.
Near the Atlantic coast in the remote Outer Hebrides, Calanais (pronounced as in the anglicised spelling, Callanish) is a stone circle at the centre of five rows dating from around 3000BC. The tallest of nearly 50 megaliths is over five metres high, and all are made of a distinctive streaked gneiss that glows against stormy skies. Curtis did much to further understanding of this and other overlooked sites on Lewis, becoming the island’s unofficial archaeologist and sharing her enthusiasms with an appreciative visiting public.
She found many more stones under the peat as she walked the moorland, probing with a metal bar. One, at Calanais itself, was re-erected in 1982, and she spotted the broken tip of another in a wall.
Archaeologists sometimes followed up her suggestions. Patrick Ashmore, who led excavations at Calanais for what is now Historic Scotland in the 1980s, praised the fieldwork and record-keeping of Curtis and each of her two husbands. On one occasion, quartz pieces she found when a road near her house was straightened led to the discovery of a bronze age burial cairn.
More: theguardian.com/science/2022/apr/07/margaret-curtis-obituary
March 17, 2022
A new project has been set up to help uncover ancient hunter-gatherer sites high in the Cairngorm mountains.
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March 2, 2022
The Old Stones of the North Exhibition
February 21, 2022
If Ken McElroy gets his way, a very unusual feature will soon be added to the wild Caithness landscape at the northern edge of mainland Britain. He plans to re-create a 50ft-high iron age “skyscraper”, known as a broch, one of the most intriguing and mysterious types of building ever constructed in the British Isles.
More info : theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/feb/20/new-caithness-broch-will-reach-50-feet-and-follow-plans-devised-in-600bc
February 17, 2022
One of Wiltshire’s most important wild landscapes has been delisted as a nature reserve. Fyfield Down, just east of the famous stone circle at Avebury, was leased to the Nature Conservancy (a predecessor of Natural England) in 1955 and declared an NNR in 1956. It has been described as the “best assemblage of sarsen stones in England”. The site lies within the Avebury World Heritage Site and the North Wessex Downs AONB.
February 15, 2022
Archaeologists excavating the windswept Ness of Brodgar are unearthing a treasure trove of neolithic villages, tombs, weapons and mysterious religious artefacts, some to be displayed in a blockbuster exhibition
If you happen to imagine that there’s not much left to discover of Britain’s stone age, or that its relics consist of hard-to-love postholes and scraps of bones, then you need to find your way to Orkney, that scatter of islands off Scotland’s north-east coast. On the archipelago’s Mainland, out towards the windswept west coast with its wave-battered cliffs, you will come to the Ness of Brodgar, an isthmus separating a pair of sparkling lochs, one of saltwater and one of freshwater. Just before the way narrows you’ll see the Stones of Stenness rising up before you. This ancient stone circle’s monoliths were once more numerous, but they remain elegant and imposing. Like a gateway into a liminal world of theatricality and magic, they lead the eye to another, even larger neolithic monument beyond the isthmus, elevated in the landscape as if on a stage. This is the Ring of Brodgar, its sharply individuated stones like giant dancers arrested mid-step – as local legend, indeed, has it.
February 14, 2022
As he went out for a row one morning on the River Thames in London, graphic designer Simon Hunt came across a rather unexpected find.
More info : bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-60348707
February 12, 2022
5,000-year-old chalk drum decorated with motifs was discovered in Yorkshire alongside burial of three children
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February 10, 2022
Stone artefacts and tooth pre-date the earliest known evidence of the species in Europe by more than 10,000 years.
Archaeologists have found evidence that Europe’s first Homo sapiens lived briefly in a rock shelter in southern France — before mysteriously vanishing.
A study published on 9 February in Science Advances1 argues that distinctive stone tools and a lone child’s tooth were left by Homo sapiens during a short stay, some 54,000 years ago — and not by Neanderthals, who lived in the rock shelter for thousands of years before and after that time.
The Homo sapiens occupation, which researchers estimate lasted for just a few decades, pre-dates the previous earliest known evidence of the species in Europe by around 10,000 years.
But some researchers are not so sure that the stone tools or tooth were left by Homo sapiens. “I find the evidence less than convincing,” says William Banks, a palaeolithic archaeologist at the French national research agency CNRS and the University of Bordeaux.
February 9, 2022
Mass immigration to Orkney during the Bronze Age replaced most of the local population – and was largely led by women, according to new research.
More info : bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-60290483
January 25, 2022
Is it an ancient tradition or an eyesore? A row has broken out about a clean-up of a clootie well in the Highlands.
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A project to reconstruct an Iron Age broch has released a new digital image of what the completed building is expected to look like.
More info : bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c35r7ygj0w4o
January 23, 2022
The dolmen, located in Shankill, appears to have collapsed in late 2021.
A WEDGE TOMB located in Shankill, Co Dublin that is over 4,500 years old has collapsed.
The tomb, which dates back to the Neolithic period before the start of the Bronze Age, appears to have collapsed in late 2021, with photos showing the capstone having fallen in.
The tomb itself is located on farmland in Shankill, and is known as the Carrickgollogan wedge tomb.
Andrew Bambrick, who runs a heritage conservation community, says that the capstone appears had fallen in between the two supporting stones, and that it was sad to see it like this.
“It’s sad, it’s been in the country for over 4,500 years and it’s collapsed,” said Bambrick.
Photos taken of the monument in early 2021 show it surrounded by fencing and overgrown with brambles.
In more recent photos, there are fewer brambles surrounding the tomb, but the capstone has collapsed inwards.
Bambrick says that while wedge tombs have collapsed in the past, it is usually due to factors like tree roots displacing the tomb and over long periods of time, erosion.
Bambrick says that he has reported the collapse to the National Monument Service, but had yet to receive a response.
More: thejournal.ie/neolithic-tomb-collapse-5657763-Jan2022/
December 23, 2021
DNA analysis of bodies in Hazleton North long cairn finds five generations of an extended family
An analysis of DNA from a 5,700-year-old tomb has revealed the world’s oldest family tree, shedding “extraordinary” light on the importance of family and descent among people who were some of Britain’s first farmers.
A research team has examined the bones and teeth of 35 people in one of Britain’s best preserved neolithic tombs, near the village of Hazleton in the Cotswolds. The results, said Dr Chris Fowler of Newcastle University, are nothing short of “astounding”.
The researchers have discovered that 27 were biological relatives from five continuous generations of a single extended family. The majority were descended from four women who all had children with the same man.
“It tells us that descent was important,” said Fowler. “When they were building these tombs and deciding who to include in them, certainly in this case, they were selecting people who were close relatives of the people who were first buried there. They have this close connection to their immediate ancestors and that extends over several generations.
“Family was important and you can see that with the inclusion of some very young children in the tomb as well.”