“When we arrived there, a man was burning a sack full of rubbish IN the burial chamber. Smoke was bellowing out from under the cap-stone and the smell of plastic was heavy in the air.”
From a letter to the Glamorgan GEM
Follow up:
Tinkinswood fire reported to police
“Adam’s stunning picture shows a shaft of life entering one side of the historic fort, before creating a perfect line to the other side.”
From The Donegal Daily
Some forty prehistoric engravings, more than 14,000 years old, have been discovered in Finistere, at the town of Plougastel-Daoulas, in Brittany (northwestern France).
Depicting several animals, these artistic vestiges date back to the Upper Palaeolithic period and are extremely rare in Europe.
Read more at archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2017/03/14000-years-old-engraved-tablets.html#qMS1uqLGExkMDcwR.99
Also:
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0173037
“The Special Stamps feature iconic sites such as Skara Brae and Avebury and exceptional artefacts including the Battersea shield and the Star Carr headdress. The stamps are all enhanced with illustrations that reveal how our ancient forebears lived and worked.
In addition to the Mint Stamps and Stamp Souvenir, the issue features an informative Presentation Pack – ideal gifts for anyone with an interest in prehistory.”
On sale from 17th January 2017
More details from the Royal Mail here
Research has found that red deer were brought to the Scottish islands by humans, but the question remains: where did the Neolithic colonists come from?
The riddle of the red deer of Orkney and the Outer Hebrides has just become even more baffling. Stags and hinds arrived with humans – but not from Scandinavia, nor from the British mainland.
And they can only have arrived by ship: transported by enterprising Neolithic colonists who had learned to treat deer as livestock, long ago and far away in Europe.
Full The Guardian article: theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/06/riddle-of-the-red-deer-orkney-deer-arrived-by-neolithic-ship-study-reveals
And from BBC News :
‘Mystery voyage’ of Scottish islands’ red deer
bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35970195
Science Magazine:
Red deer came to Scottish islands from unexpected places
sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/red-deer-came-scottish-islands-unexpected-places
The original paper published by The Royal Society:
Colonization of the Scottish islands via long-distance Neolithic transport of red deer
A huge boulder which a road was bizarrely constructed around decades ago – could finally be removed after a motorist crashed into it.
The prospect of the ancient stone, thought to have been located in Chapel Hill, Soulbury, for millions of years, being taken away has prompted outrage from villagers as Bucks County Council finds itself stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Read more from Leighton Buzzard Online: leightonbuzzardonline.co.uk/news/local-news/bizarre-ancient-landmark-in-middle-of-road-could-be-dug-up-after-accident-claim-1-7295148#ixzz44wfSlNBm
And from The Guardian: theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/02/the-soulbury-stone-never-loses-and-now-the-council-knows-it
Update from BBC News:
Soulbury stone: White lines ‘horrific’ and ‘an eyesore‘
White lines painted around a boulder, thought to have been in place 11,000 years in an attempt to make it safer, have been described as an “eyesore” and “horrific” on social media.
From the Jersey Evening Post:
“A DOLMEN that has stood for thousands of years in St Clement has been vandalised.
The Société Jersiaise is appealing for information after Dolmen de Mont Ubé was daubed in spray paint.
The Neolithic passage grave was built around 6,000 years ago and can be found in trees around 100 metres from Rue de la Blinerie.”
From the Liverpool Echo:
Liverpool schoolboy Connor Hannaway has made history after discovering a carving which had somehow escaped the notice of archaeologists for hundreds of years.
The 13-year-old only spotted the etching during a school trip to Calderstones Park by chance – after dropping his pencil on the floor while he was making some notes!
Connor, who lives in Aigburth and attends Calderstones School, saw the bird carving at the bottom of one of the six Neolithic calderstones his school is named after – but, initially, no one believed him.
He recalls: “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t dropped my pencil. Because of the light I could only see the head of the bird, but then its back and tail became visible. I just thought that everyone must know it was there.”
Full Story: liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/nostalgia/liverpool-schoolboy-makes-amazing-historical-9066645
‘We’re increasingly realising that there was a lot of violence in these early farming communities – they weren’t peaceful hippie types,’ says Amy Bogaard an archaeologist at the University of Oxford.
From Planet Earth Online
Europe’s first farmers used sophisticated muckspreading techniques to keep their land fertile some eight millennia ago, according to new research. And this revolution in agriculture may have played an important part in the genesis of the violence between communities that’s blighted human society ever since.
It seems people were manuring and watering their crops as long as 6000BC. Until recently, the consensus has been that farmers only started using animal dung during Iron Age or Roman times, and that more ancient farmers of the Neolithic used a slash-and-burn approach involving working a patch of land for a few years and then moving on once they’d exhausted its nutrients.
But a team of researchers has analysed charred pulse seeds and cereal grains from 13 Neolithic sites around Europe, looking at the relative proportions of several different forms of nitrogen, known as isotopes. They looked in particular at the relative abundance of the heavier nitrogen-15 isotope relative to its lighter sibling nitrogen-14.
Experiments on modern farms show that the more muck you spread on a field, and the more often you do it, the higher the ratio of N-15 to N-14 climbs. In crops across Europe, the paper’s authors found clear evidence of that the locals were spreading the dung of goats, cattle, sheep and pigs on their fields much earlier than we’d assumed.
This suggests they understood how important the land’s fertility was and tried to preserve or even increase it for the next generation, having noticed that animal dung let them grow bigger, healthier plants. This involved long-term investments of the time and effort needed to collect, transport and spread manure that would then slowly release its nutrients over years and decades.
This could have led to important social transformations; as farmers started to pass down fertile land to their children, some of the earliest divisions between rich and poor might have started to emerge. If heavy manuring had made one group’s land unusually fertile, their neighbours might have been tempted to resort to violence to get it.
‘The fact that farmers made long-term investments such as manuring their land sheds new light on the nature of the early farming landscapes in Neolithic times ,’ says Dr Amy Bogaard, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
‘The idea that farmland could be cared for by the same family for generations seems quite an advanced notion, but rich fertile land would have been viewed as extremely valuable for growing crops,’ she adds. ‘We believe that as land was viewed as a commodity to be inherited, social differences in early European farming communities started to emerge between the haves and the have-nots.‘
She cites the example of the Neolithic mass burial at Talheim in Germany, which holds the remains of a whole community who were massacred – men, women and children – with blows to the head from the stone axes that farmers used to clear land, arguing that this could have resulted from a raid intended to seize the community’s land. ‘We’re increasingly realising that there was a lot of violence in these early farming communities – they weren’t peaceful hippie types,’ says Bogaard. ‘Some of that violence was probably in the form of sporting or ritual contests between communities. But some of it was very deadly, like what we see at Talheim, where it looks like the attackers went in by night and killed everyone.‘
The 124 samples of charred barley, wheat, lentils and peas the team examined came from harvested crops that were stored in buildings that then burned down. They came from sites dating from between 6000BC and 2400BC, and are taken from places across Europe including Hambledon Hill in Dorset and Lismore Fields in Derbyshire.
The NERC-funded study even suggests farmers understood which crops would benefit most from manure and concentrated their resources on them, leaving relatively hardy crops unfertilised; in one site in southern Greece, naked wheat had been heavily manured while barley had received very little fertilisation. Pulse crops, meanwhile, had received both manure and lots of water. ‘Subsistence farmers are very observant of what we would see as very small differences in plant growth,’ Bogaard explains. ‘They would have noticed quickly that their middens and dung heaps produced much bigger, healthier plants, and later realised that certain crops benefited more from manure than others.‘
From Planet Earth Online:
Mummified bodies made of chopped up people? It’s not a legend from ancient Egypt but a find from the Outer Hebrides. Tamera Jones finds out how the latest forensic techniques were applied to the mystery of Britain’s first prehistoric mummies.
When Professor Mike Parker Pearson from the University of Sheffield started excavating the Bronze Age Cladh Hallan settlement on South Uist, one of the first things his team found was a row of three roundhouses. Radio-carbon dating showed they were built around 1100 BC.
Further digging revealed several burials directly under the houses. Not so unusual in itself, but the archaeologists were surprised by the contorted and scrunched-up positions of the skeletons, which looked similar to mummy bundles found in Peru.
‘We also noticed that the male skeleton had a full set of teeth in his lower jaw, but the upper set was completely missing,’ says Pearson. ‘Our first thought was that this was some kind of Bronze Age torture victim.‘
But forensic pathology showed the two jaws didn’t match at all. Several months of painstaking analysis revealed that in fact the man’s skull, mandible and torso came from three different people.
‘It looked like these individuals had been cut up and put back together to look like one person,’ says Pearson.
Then the mystery deepened even further. When the bodies were dated they turned out to be several hundred years older than the houses, which meant they had been stored for several generations before they were buried.
The position of the bones in both adult skeletons suggested they had still been held together by soft tissue when they were buried, so they had been stored with particular care.
Pearson and biomedical archaeologist Professor Terry Brown from the University of Manchester, took the remains to NERC’s Isotope Geosciences Laboratory where scientists used a range of techniques to work out where the bodies might have been kept. These included the rather grisly mercury intrusion porosimetry, which shows how far gut bacteria has eaten into the surrounding bones after death. In this case, not very far; decay had started in the male’s torso but then something had stopped it, and there was no sign of decay in the female corpse at all.
Other techniques showed Pearson and his colleagues that the surfaces of the bones had become demineralised, something that happens in an acidic environment. All the forensic evidence suggested that the bodies had been preserved in a peat bog for several months before being taken out and dried. They must then have been stored above ground for hundreds of years before being merged with other mummified individuals and finally buried.
‘At the time this was the first ever evidence of mummification outside of South America and Egypt,’ says Pearson. ‘Before this, mummification in the British Bronze Age was unheard of.‘
Most recently, DNA from the female’s skull, jaw, arm and thigh bones has shown that, just like the male, the woman’s skeleton was made up of at least three individuals – and the cranium and mandible were male.
What led our ancestors to mummify and combine these bodies is anyone’s guess. But Pearson thinks it has something to do with merging ancestries.
‘Lots of fields and ditches were being built across Britain in the middle Bronze Age’, he says. ‘An obvious thing to do would be to coalesce ancestors’ remains as a way of asserting rights over this newly enclosed land.‘
7,000-year-old water wells unearthed in eastern Germany suggest that prehistoric farmers in Europe were skilled carpenters long before metal was discovered or used for tools, made water wells out of oak timbers.
The finds, reported in a paper in the journal PLoS ONE, contradict the common belief that metal tools were required to make complex wooden structures.
The wooden water wells discovered in Germany by the team led by Dr Willy Tegel of the University of Freiburg are over 7,000 years old, and suggest that early farmers had unexpectedly refined carpentry skills.
“This early Neolithic craftsmanship now suggests that the first farmers were also the first carpenters,” the archeologists said.
These first Central European farmers migrated from the Great Hungarian Plain approximately 7,500 years ago, and left an archeological trail of settlements, ceramics and stone tools across the fertile regions of the continent, a record named Linear Pottery Culture.
Full news story from Sci-news here
Original article on PLoS ONE here
Archaeologists gain insight into ancient desert drawings – by walking them
The first findings of the most detailed study yet by two British archaeologists into the Nazca Lines – enigmatic drawings created between 2,100 and 1,300 years ago in the Peruvian desert – have been published in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity.
As part of a five-year investigation, Professor Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History and Dr Nicholas Saunders of the University of Bristol’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology have walked 1,500 km of desert in southern Peru, tracing the lines and geometric figures created by the Nasca people between 100 BC and AD 700.
The confusing palimpsest of ‘geoglyphs’—desert drawings—has attracted a host of theories purporting to explain them ever since they were discovered during the 1920s – including the bizarre ideas of Erich Von Däniken who supposed they were made by visiting extra-terrestrials.
Professor Ruggles, Emeritus Professor of Archaeoastronomy at the University, and Dr Saunders combined the experience and knowledge gained by walking the lines with scientific data obtained from satellite digital mapping, studying the layering where designs are superimposed, and examining the associated pottery. The result is the most detailed such study to date.
In the midst of their study area is a unique labyrinth originally discovered by Ruggles when he spent a few days on the Nazca desert back in 1984. Its existence came as a complete surprise. Professor Ruggles recounts: “When I set out along the labyrinth from its centre, I didn’t have the slightest idea of its true nature. Only gradually did I realize that here was a figure set out on a huge scale and still traceable, that it was clearly intended for walking, and that I was almost certainly the first person to have recognized it for what it was, and walked it from end to end, for some 1500 years. Factors beyond my control brought the 1984 expedition to an abrupt halt and it was only 20 years later that I eventually had the opportunity to return to Nazca, relocate the figure and study it fully”.
Invisible in its entirety to the naked eye, the only way to become aware of the labyrinth is to walk its 4.4km length, experiencing a series of disorienting direction changes and other expected features.
As Professor Ruggles explains: “The labyrinth is completely hidden in the landscape, which is flat and virtually featureless. As you walk it, only the path stretching ahead of you is visible at any given point. Similarly, if you map it from the air its form makes no sense at all.
“But if you walk it, ‘discovering’ it as you go, you have a set of experiences that in many respects would have been the same for anyone walking it in the past. The ancient Nasca peoples created the geoglyphs, and used them, by walking on the ground. ‘Sharing’ some of those experiences by walking the lines ourselves is an important source of information that complements the ‘hard’ scientific and archaeological evidence and can really aid our attempts to make anthropological sense of it.”
The arid conditions have ensured the remarkable preservation of Nazca’s fragile geoglyphs for a millennium and a half. Nonetheless, segments of nearly all of the lines and figures—including the labyrinth—have been washed away by flash floods that occurred from time to time in the past. And, of course, people through the ages have walked across the desert plateau to cross from one valley to another.
Professor Ruggles and Dr Saunders have studied the integrity of many lines and figures within their 80km2 study area. Dr Saunders says: “Meandering and well-worn trans-desert pathways served functional purposes but they are quite different from the arrow-straight lines and geometric shapes which seem more likely to have had a spiritual and ritual purpose. It may be, we suggest, that the real importance of some of these desert drawings was in their creation rather than any subsequent physical use.”
Certainly, the pristine state and well-preserved edges of the labyrinth suggest that it was never walked by more than a few people in single file. In fact, the survival of many geoglyphs seems remarkable given the proximity of the area to the pilgrimage centre of Cahuachi, in the nearby Nazca valley, and the fact that people carried on walking across the pampa during the ensuing centuries right up to modern times.
Even if the labyrinth was not unique when it was built, it may well be the only such construction whose integrity has been preserved to the extent that it still can be recognized in today’s landscape. As Professor Ruggles observes: “Excavations commonly uncover objects undisturbed for centuries and even millennia. But it is hard to conceive many places on the planet were you could still “discover” a human construction that has lain hidden on the surface of the ground for as long as 1500 years, simply by walking along it and seeing where your feet take you.”
Issud by University of Leicester Press Office on 10 December 2012
A Bronze Age standing stone that was knocked down by a reversing car last year has been returned to its original position in Pembrokeshire.
The Bedd Morris stone on Dinas Mountain near Newport has been a landmark for around 3,500 years.
Standing at 6ft (1.8m) it is thought the vehicle accidentally knocked over the stone, crushing a fence.
Full story from the BBC
Ice Age art – arrival of the modern mind
An exhibition 40,000 years in the making
7 February – 26 May 2013
Discover masterpieces from the last Ice Age drawn from across Europe in this ground-breaking show. Created between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago by artists with modern minds like our own, this is a unique opportunity to see the world’s oldest known sculptures, drawings and portraits.
Peat bogs reveal only sporadic exploitation of South-west England’s tin deposits in the Bronze Age, suggesting only limited tin mining and bronze production in the area at that time.
From Planet Earth Online:
Britain was a major source of tin in the ancient world but details of how this important commodity was exploited were sketchy at best – until Andy Meharg and colleagues Kevin Edwards and Ed Schofield got stuck into two West Country peat bogs.
Tin has played an important role in the development of human society. Either on its own or mixed with copper to form bronze, it had a place in everything from coins and jewellery to armour and weapons. But unlike copper, tin deposits are extremely rare, and ancient Mediterranean cultures (from the Bronze Age through to Roman times) had to look to the remote Atlantic fringes of Europe for their closest supplies.
South-west Britain was home to the largest European tin deposits, and this mineral wealth must have been a significant source of economic and cultural contact between Britain and mainland Europe. But there is not much evidence, archaeological or historical, for how the tin trade developed.
Around 440BC, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about tin sources in the ancient world: ‘I cannot speak with certainty, however, about the marginal regions which lie toward the west, in Europe...Nor am I certain of the existence of the Cassiterides Islands, from which we get our tin.’ Pytheas of Massalia (modern Marseilles), who is credited with being the first person to circumnavigate Britain around 300BC, also talked of a tin-bearing island named Mictus within six days’ sail of Britain.
Cornwall, particularly St Michael’s Mount, has long been associated with the ‘tin islands’ – the Cassiterides – to which Herodotus referred, but it’s not much to go on.
In an attempt to add to the body of evidence, myself and colleagues at the University of Aberdeen looked to the peat bogs of the south-west. These bogs have been soaking up atmospheric pollution for centuries and we hoped that pollution would include traces of tin released into the atmosphere from mining and tinworking. The sites we chose – Tor Royal on Dartmoor and Dozmary Pool on Bodmin Moor – are themselves better known as the location for Sherlock Holmes’ encounter with the Hound of the Baskervilles, and the place where King Arthur deposited Excalibur, respectively. More pertinent to our study, though, is that both lie undisturbed in the middle of an ancient tin-mining region, and both are ombrotrophic – they get all their water from rainfall rather than from springs or streams. This is important because it means any minerals they contain must have been deposited from the atmosphere rather than carried from surrounding rocks or soils.
Our approach was based on the fact that minute particles of tin are released when ore is crushed and smelted, and these eventually fall back to the ground or are washed out of the atmosphere by rain. Assuming these particles had accumulated and lain undisturbed in the bogs, analysing the amount of tin at different depths would give us a sequence of tin exploitation, with greater concentrations representing periods of more intense mining and smelting. And because the bogs are made up of organic material, we could radiocarbon date the layers associated with different phases of tin deposition to find out when they had occurred.
Our specialised equipment enabled us to core 4m down through the peat, so we were able to work out a chronology of tin deposition and, by analogy, of tin mining and smelting, going back thousands of years.
This chronology adds so much detail to what we know about this period that it will allow us to rewrite the story of ancient Britain’s trade links with Europe.
Analysis of the Himmelsscheibe, a bronze disk found near Leipzig, Germany, which is inlayed with a gold map of the heavens and dates to around 1600BC, indicates that it contains tin ores from south-west Britain. So British tin was undoubtedly traded to some extent during the Bronze Age, but our findings suggest that production was low.
The cores showed that, at most, there was only sporadic atmospheric deposition of tin into the peat during the Bronze Age, between around 2500 and 800BC, and this pattern continued until early Roman colonisation, around AD100. This confirms what we had already gleaned from archaeological and fragmentary documentary evidence; that there may have been only limited tin mining and bronze production in south-west Britain over this period.
From thisissomerset:
Investigations into the damage to Priddy Circles on the Mendip hills have been completed.
A 72-year-old man has been released from police bail and the case has been passed to the jurisdiction of English Heritage who are expecting to decide what action, if any, to take in the next few weeks.
The Priddy Circles are one of the most important neolithic monuments in the country.
The circles, which are contemporary with the first stages of Stonehenge, are a scheduled monument.
One of them was damaged at some point between May 1 and June 23 last year and the damage to the circle outraged the archeological community.
There have been calls for the damaged sections to be reinstated by archeologists at the expense of those responsible.
If convicted those responsible could be fined anything up to £20,000.
They could also be jailed for up to six months and could have to pay to have it reinstated.
The circles could also be compulsorily purchased by the government in order to protect it.
Anyone accused of damaging a monument can say in their defence that they tried to protect the monument while carrying out work. They can also say that they had to carry out the work for safety reasons or did not know that the monument was within the area affected by the works or that it was a scheduled monument.
An English Heritage spokesman said: “A detailed investigation has been carried out by English Heritage in partnership with Avon and Somerset Police into the circumstances surrounding damage to one of the Priddy Circles.
“The evidence gathered in the course of the investigation is now with English Heritage to consider and a decision as to any further action will be taken in the near future.”
From the Irish Independent
Sean Quinn’s downfall is fairies’ revenge say locals in Cavan
He was once Ireland’s richest man, with a fortune of €4.7bn, before his huge gamble on Anglo Irish Bank shares toppled him into bankruptcy.
But for some in his heartland on the Cavan/Fermanagh border, the downfall of Sean Quinn has more to do with the wrath of the fairies than risky business moves.
According to these locals, it was the decision to move a megalithic burial tomb 20 years ago which led to the fall of his cement, hotels, and insurance empire.
The Aughrim Wedge Tomb stood for 4,000 years in the townland after which it is named, two miles outside Ballyconnell, Co Cavan.
But when it got in the way of the expansion of a massive quarry for Quinn Concrete in 1992, permission was granted by the Office of Public Works to move it.
Following a full excavation of the site, it was moved -- stone by stone -- and relocated in the grounds of Mr Quinn’s Slieve Russell Hotel on the other side of the village.
Mr Quinn has since lost the cement works, the hotel, a raft of other businesses and his multi-billion euro fortune. According to bankruptcy documents, he now claims to have just €11,000 in the bank.
Some locals have linked the movement of the tomb to Mr Quinn’s financial woes.
“I’m a big supporter of Sean Quinn because of what he has done for this area but that tomb should never have been moved,” said publican Toirbhealach Lyons, the owner of Molly Maguire’s pub in Ballyconnell.
“There would be a lot of people who would think you could never have any luck after moving an ancient tombstone.”
Such superstitions are common and widely believed according to University of Ulster folklore expert Seamus MacFlionn.
“Cavan is full of ancient sites like these and therefore many people there would be more superstitious about moving any ancient rath, tomb or fairy tree,” he said.
“People do genuinely believe that to do so brings bad luck. It’s part of our ancient Irish history,” he added.
However, not everyone in the area subscribes to the view that the movement of the tomb brought Mr Quinn his bad luck. One sceptic is Ballyconnell butcher Gerard Crowe, “It’s a load of auld rubbish. . . Simple as that,” he said.
From the Salisbury Journal
A Planning inspector has ruled that byways surrounding Stonehenge will remain open.
The decision follows inquiries into proposals to close the byways as well as parts of the A344 and the inspector has decided that although the road will close, the byways should remain open.
English Heritage plans to return the area to grass as part of plans for a new visitors’ centre at Airman’s Corner.
Planning inspector Alan Boyland said: “I accept that Wiltshire has a considerably greater length of byways than any other county. This is not however, in itself, a reason for allowing a further loss for recreational motor vehicle users.
“In this case, the loss of a further 7km, particularly given the strategic importance of those routes, and without similar alternative routes being available, would in my view be significantly detrimental to the current users.”
At the inquiry, Druid leader King Arthur Pendragon objected to the proposals to close the byways as he said it is a violation of his human rights not to be able to access the area, particularly during Pagan ceremonies such as celebrations of the solstices and equinox.
Mr Pendragon said: “It appears that the inspector has erred on the side of common sense and found himself in agreement with the points made.”
The new visitor centre has got planning permission and despite funding problems English Heritage hopes the it can be completed by 2013.
A Penzance archaeologist and historian has joined with Cornish MP George Eustice in calling for ‘English’ Heritage to be replaced, in Cornwall, with a locally based body.
Craig Weatherhill, author of several books, papers and articles, is exasperated by what he terms: “This arrogant quango’s disgraceful neglect of, and contempt for, Cornwall’s valuable heritage”.
The latest in a series of incidents stems from a site meeting on Aug 6th, by groups concerned with serial damage to the Tregeseal stone circle, St Just, and associated ancient monuments, allegedly by activities imposed upon the moorland by sister quango Natural ‘England’.
“Initially, ‘English’ Heritage did not want to know, “says Mr Weatherhill, “until the Celtic League, an organisation recognised by the United Nations, became involved. The Assistant Inspector of Ancient Monuments, who attended, promised to produce his recommendations within a fortnight. He failed to do so. Frequent enquiries since then have merely produced adjusted promises, the last being for Oct.19. That has come and gone, and still there is nothing. It is nowhere near good enough.
‘English’ Heritage has a long record of turning blind eyes to the damage and destruction of ancient sites in Cornwall, from the Cadbury’s Creme Egg Hunt in 1984, to the utter destruction of numerous sites they are appointed to protect. They ruined the fogous at Carn Euny and Chysauster, and publicly insulted those who spoke out. According to their then Chairman, the latter ‘wasn’t exactly Stonehenge’, which pretty well sums up their whole attitude. Unless it is a site from which they can turn a profit, they simply do not want to know. In fact, they’ve hived off all the guardianship sites they were appointed to manage to people like the National Trust and the Cornwall Heritage Trust – except for those which generate revenue.”
Referring to the original bid that secured World Heritage Site status for Cornish mining, Mr Weatherhill outlined the actions of ‘English’ Heritage to delist and support the demolition of a Grade II star engine house near St Austell. “EH’s case,” he said, “was that the engine house was worthless as it did not contain an engine. This was astonishingly ignorant, and not only effectively placed all but two Cornish engine houses at serious risk, but almost jeopardised the entire WHS bid. Of course, it need hardly be said that the applicant was a major corporation”.
“At Tintagel in 1998,” he added, “news of the discovery of a piece of slate incised with names of 6th century men, including one called Artognou, was suppressed by EH until the start of the peak holiday season. Then they arranged headlines in every major newspaper, claiming proof of King Arthur. Of course, this was total bilge, but EH was far more interested in the gate money than they were giving historical facts. Our heritage deserves much, much better than this.
“In 1988, Penwith Council wrote to EH, concerned that significant monuments in the area had no legal protection. EH assured them that a radical new Scheduling list was in progress, to be complete within 5 years. It never appeared, not to this very day, but EH kept on giving the Council that assurance.” Mr Weatherhill says. “Then, just last year, I came across a document written by Cornwall’s Historic Environment Service in 2008, clearly stating that all Scheduling in West Penwith had been halted in 1987, EH deciding that the new Environmentally Sensitive Area scheme for Penwith would be adequate protection. Of course, it was no such thing. The ESA had no statutory teeth, and only a voluntary take-up. If that wasn’t bad enough, EH had deliberately lied, several times, to the local authority! I know this to be fact, because I was the officer at the Council who wrote the letters.
“EH’s latest piece of blinding arrogance is to see a play about World War II at Pendennis Castle cancelled because of the quango’s crazy insistence that all reference to Nazis and Jews be written out of the script. It’s unbelievable!”
Mr Weatherhill, who became a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd in 1981 for services to archaeology, claimed he could cite many more cases of ‘English’ Heritage’s neglect and misrepresentation, least of all that which marketed Cornish Celtic heritage as that of a totally unconnected people. “There is a frankly sinister political aspect to EH’s policies”, he claimed.
His call for the disbanding of ‘English’ Heritage and Natural ‘England’ is also economically sensible, he suggests. “If the government is serious about curtailing expenditure,” he says, “then what is the sense in maintaining two tiers of administration in both fields? Get rid of the national bodies, and devolve their powers to local level and local knowledge. We still await signs of Mr Cameron’s much-vaunted ‘localism’, especially on this side of the Amazon*, so here’s a perfect way to kickstart it.”
He added that most Cornish people he had spoken to would be greatly relieved to see the backs of both quangoes.
*This refers to David Cameron’s on-air blunder regarding protests over his proposed transgression of Cornwall’s historic River Tamar border with the statement: “It’s hardly the Amazon, is it?”
From the BBC News:
“Ancient sites and monuments in north Pembrokeshire have been blighted with graffiti, broken glass and an abandoned car, it has been claimed.
The Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority says a car contaminated a Site of Special Scientific Interest below the Carn Ffoi Iron Age Fort.
It also says a megalithic stone at Bedd Arthur, a Scheduled Ancient Monument, has had names scratched into it.
Historic monuments agency Cadw said damage was often “irreversible”.
The park authority’s criticisms followed news that another ancient stone, Bedd Morris near Newport, was recently toppled after being hit by a vehicle.”
From PlanetEarthonline
Scientists have built the most comprehensive timeline yet for working out the exact order in which geological and archaeological events happened in Britain over the last three million years. And they’ve done it using fossilised snails.
The mammoth 11-year project, published online in Nature, is the most comprehensive of its kind and clears up a number of archaeological and geological debates.
It shows that our ancestors lived in Britain during most of the warm periods of the last few million years. But it supports the idea that they were absent in the most recent warm period – or interglacial – 125,000 years ago. During this time, the climate was warm enough for hippopotamuses to have roamed the British Isles.
‘It’s possible that the warm climate contributed to higher sea levels and people just couldn’t get across the Strait of Dover,’ says Dr Kirsty Penkman from the University of York, lead author of the study.
...The timeline is so complete that any debate over the timing of human occupation in Britain or past geological events should now be dead in the water.
From Stonepages
Maltese prehistoric site scheduled to stand
The MEPA (Malta Environment & Planning Authority) board confirmed the scheduling of a prehistoric site and turned down appeals to have the scheduling reconsidered.
In the area around Ħagra ta’ Sansuna in Xagħra lie the remains of a prehistoric temple. A man who owns nearby land said that the buffer zone negatively affected the value of his land, while another compared the scheduling to expropriation, and cited antiquity scholars John Evans and David Trump who expressed doubts about the site.
But the Heritage Planning Unit representative pointed out that land value was not a consideration when sites were scheduled, and pointed out that Evans and Trump doubted what the site was, (i.e. whether it is the remains of a Neolithic temple or a Bronze Age menhir/dolmen), but not its archaeological value. It should also be pointed out that in the 1968 National Ordinance Survey Maps, the site is indicated as a Neolithic Monument.
HPU also said the objector is incorrect in stating that there are no associated finds. During the widening of Triq Ġnien Imrik in 1946, a stone mortar used for corn grinding together with a number of prehistoric sherds were discovered and hastily re-buried. The MEPA board subsequently unanimously voted to keep the scheduling as is.
Archaeologists hail oldest wooden structure ever found on river, despite security services’ armed response to researchers.
When MI6 set up home on the banks of the Thames one secret escaped its watchful eyes. The oldest wooden structure ever found on the river, timbers almost 7,000 years old, have been discovered buried in the silt below the windows of the security services’ ziggurat headquarters at Vauxhall, south London.
The archaeologists who uncovered the six hefty timber piles had to explain to the security services what they were up to when armed police turned up after they were spotted pottering about on a foggy day in the mud, armed only with tripods, cameras and measuring equipment – not, as one spectator had apparently reported, shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.
“They accepted there wasn’t much damage we could do with a tripod,” said Gustave Milne, the archaeologist who leads the Thames Discovery programme that has been surveying the entire prehistoric foreshore, uncovering centuries of ancient wharves, fish traps, jetties and ship timbers.
The timbers, partly scoured bare by erosion of the river bed, the largest up to a third of a metre in diameter, were discovered in work during exceptionally low tides last February, but carbon dating work – revealed in the new edition of London Archaeologist journal – has only recently been completed, proving that the trees were felled between 4790 BC and 4490 BC.
Full story in The Guardian
More prehistoric human footprints have been found along a 4 km strip of coast between Formby and Ainsdale that date back some 5,000 years.
Archaeologists today dubbed the discovery ‘sensational’, claiming it is one of the most significant historic footprint finds the country has seen.
Full article in Champion
A solitary stone in a windswept Welsh field has helped shed light on how our neolithic ancestors came together in worship thousands of years ago.
A recent excavation programme at a standing stone known as Trefael, near Newport in Pembrokeshire, has revealed at least two unique episodes in its early history.
Archaeologists say as well as being a portal dolmen (a tomb made of giant stones) the standing stone was probably used as a ritual marker to guide communities through a sacred landscape.
Bristol University lecturer Dr George Nash, archaeologist and specialist in prehistoric and contemporary art, said the stones acted to create a precinct of sacred ground in the county.
The idea was that our neolithic ancestors could follow an organised pattern of worship, similar to that of church-goers in modern times.
What we have got is human communities who were very similar to ourselves. The neolithic communities had designated landscapes that were special and sacred, said Mr Nash.
Read More at WalesOnline
From The Star (South Yorkshire):
“PREHISTORIC art 3,000 years old was discovered by chance in woodland by a council worker while carrying out routine maintenance work.
John Gilpin, a woodlands officer in the Parks and Countryside department, stumbled upon the find in Ecclesall Woods.
He discovered a boulder with a series of markings, lines and cuts – which, after being examined by experts, has been declared a significant archaeological find.
Jim McNeil, of South Yorkshire Archaeological Service, said: “I was called in and recorded the discovery, taking photographs.
“I have taken advice from a specialist who considers this to be an important piece of prehistoric rock art. This is the second example of such rock art from Ecclesall Woods, although other examples are known from the Peak District and further north in the Pennines.”
From PlanetEarth online
What were Britain’s primordial forests like before humans started tampering with the environment? The latest clues from a study of fossil beetles suggest that the ancient forest was patchy and varied in density across Britain.
Scientists have long debated the nature of Europe’s ancient landscape and hesitated between a nightmarish, close-canopied forest and a pasture woodland of oak and hazel trees, similar to the modern New Forest, which is kept open by grazing animals.
This is not just an academic question. ‘If we want to manage our forests and species to keep them as natural as possible, we have to know what natural is,’ says Dr Nicki Whitehouse, a palaeoecologist at Queens University Belfast.
‘The traditional view is that the original Holocene woodland in Europe was quite dense with a closed canopy,’ she says. ‘But this is probably too simplistic and nowadays the debate is more about the degree of openness of the ancient forest and the role of grazing animals in maintaining this structure.‘
Together with Dr David Smith, a specialist on environmental archaeology at the University of Birmingham, Whitehouse decided to look for clues in an overlooked source: ancient beetle remains.
Beetles are a good source of environmental data because it’s easy to tell species apart and each type of beetle is specific to a given habitat. Some thrive in dense forests, others prefer sparse woodlands and grassland areas, while dung beetles are usually found in areas grazed by large herbivores. The proportion of beetle species in a given period of time ‘allows us to reconstruct past habitats with detail,’ explains Whitehouse.
Whitehouse and Smith looked at 26 beetle assemblages from different parts of Britain, from Thorne Moors in Yorkshire to Silbury in Hampshire, and looked at how beetle communities changed over 7000 years, since the end of the Ice Age until 4000 years ago.
They found that the history of the original British forest is not as straightforward as previously thought.
Between 9500 and 6000 BC, the fossils were mostly from open and pasture beetle species, with moderate contributions from forest types and hardly any dung beetles. This suggests open patches of oak, hazel, birch and pine forests of variable tree density, similar to modern pasture woodland.
Around 6000 BC forest beetles become more abundant, grassland species decline and ‘we see an overall closing of the forest canopy in the insect record,’ says Whitehouse.
By 4000 BC, everything changes. This was the time that humans started pursuing an agricultural way of life, raising animals for meat and dairy products. Dung beetles become more abundant, while the other types of beetles decrease.
‘The transition to the Neolithic was rather abrupt,’ says Whitehouse. The dense forest gave way to pasture woodlands and open landscapes, kept open by the increasing number of grazing animals feeding on saplings.
The beetles turn the history of the British forest into a complex tale. Instead of a continuous closed canopy forest, Britain was covered by uneven patches of forest, with different levels of openness driven by local phenomena such as storms, forest fires or floods. But grazing animals apparently did not play a role until the beginning of agriculture.
The beetle findings, published last week in Quaternary Science Reviews, largely agree with the data collected from the study of ancient pollen. But ‘pollen studies have probably over-estimated the abundance of closed canopy trees and under-estimated the more heterogeneous nature of the landscape at this time,’ says Whitehouse. ‘The Holocene forest was probably patchier than we though: open areas were of local significance and important features of the landscape.‘
From The Portsmouth News:
Researchers at the University of Portsmouth believe they have solved an ancient Mediterranean mystery.
The mystery of how 2ft deep tracks were cut into the rock of Malta has been a puzzle for years.
Now Professor Derek Mottershead, of the university’s geography department, has followed generations of scholars to unravel the mysteries of the Maltese landscape.
The tracks, or ruts, were almost certainly caused by carts because the rock was not strong enough to support the wooden wheels of loaded carts.
They are up to 2ft deep and more than 30km of them run in pairs criss-crossing the island.
Professor Mottershead’s team came up with a design of a cart to fit the field evidence, estimated its weight and calculated the stresses involved.
They discovered that in some places the rock was so soft that after heavy rain a single passage of a cart could cause the rock to fail.
Professor Mottershead said: ‘The ruts have been studied and talked about for centuries and though it is obvious they are related to vehicles nobody understood how they were made or even when.
‘The underlying rock in Malta is weak and when it’s wet it loses about 80 per cent of its strength.
‘What is unique to Malta is the sheer number of ruts. For years they have attracted the attention of archaeologists but until now we didn’t have a convincing explanation of the mechanics of how they could have been formed.‘
The team included Dr Alastair Pearson and Martin Schaefer, also of the University of Portsmouth. Their research was published in the journal Antiquity.
From the Natural Environment Research Council:
“The earliest known evidence of horse domestication has been unearthed in Kazakhstan in central Asia. New research suggests the Botai Culture have been riding horses and using their milk for the last 5500 years.
This is around 2000 years before horses were domesticated in Europe and 1000 years earlier than previously thought for Kazakhstan.
The findings could point to the beginnings of horse domestication and the origins of the horse breeds we know today. Archaeologists argue that it was the domestication of horses that opened the way to trade, warfare, transportation, agriculture and many other aspects of human civilisation.”
From the Telegraph:
“Plans to build a £20 million pound visitor centre at Stonehenge in time for the 2012 Olympics are under threat because of a major row between Britain’s two leading heritage organisations.
The National Trust and English Heritage, who are part of a committee set up to ensure the centre is built in time for the games, have clashed over the proposed location for the new building.
English Heritage, the government body, which is responsible for the day to day running of the World Heritage site wants to build the new visitor centre and car park on a piece of land known as the Fargo plantation.
But the National Trust, which owns a large chunk of the land surrounding the 5,000-year-old site is refusing to support the proposal because it says that the installation of such a significant construction would breach the site’s World Heritage status.
It wants to build the centre on a site called Airman’s Cross which is further away from the stones. Under this proposal visitors would be ferried to the stones via a new transit system.
The row is a major blow for the Government which announced last year that a new centre would be built in time for the expected influx of visitors in 2012.
Barbara Follett, the Heritage Minister had been expected to announce the proposed location last week but has now postponed the decision to January because of the deadlock.
Supporters of the new centre are adamant that if it is to be built on time than a planning application must be lodged with Salisbury Council within the first three months of next year.
If both heritage bodies fail to reach a compromise than either side could force a planning inquiry which would add further delays to the proposals.
Supporters of the new proposal believe that the money for the project will not be forthcoming if it can’t be completed in time for the games.”
From the Stornoway Gazette:
More natural setting for Calanais Stones
SOME of the modern footpaths at the Calanais Standing Stones are to be removed to create a more natural setting and allow visitors to wander more freely.
It is hoped that the move will further improve the enjoyment of visitors to one of the country’s most celebrated prehistoric monuments.
The work is timetabled for November and will involve replacing the chipped stone paths with turf.
Stephen Watt, Historic Scotland district architect, said: “We believe that visitors will prefer a more natural setting for the stones and a greater sense of freedom to wander among them.
“The path from the visitor centre to the site will remain in place for easy access and the grass around the stones will be kept short.”
The Calanais Standing Stones date from around 3,000 BC and are an important attraction for the Isle of Lewis.
From the BBC:
Deal is agreed in park quarry row
A dispute over quarrying in the Peak District has finally been settled.
The park authority had been battling Stancliffe Stone over future extraction at the Lees Cross and Endcliffe quarries, near Bakewell.
Now the company has agreed to give up its planning permission for the site in return for permission to work Dale View quarry.
The authority said the deal would protect a valuable part of the park and surrounding heritage sites.
The authority said that following extended negotiations with landowners and quarry operators, the final legal documents were completed this week.
The case had seen years of controversy, court cases and and a protest camp.
Lees Cross and Endcliffe lie close to the pre-historic Nine Ladies Stone Circle, burial mounds and cairns on Stanton Moor.
Stancliffe has promised to manage biodiversity habitats in neighbouring hay meadows and woodland throughout Dale View quarry’s 21-year active life.
From The Scotsman
A BRONZE Age structure thought to have been used as a sauna has been saved from destruction by the sea after a team of archaeologists moved the entire find to a safer location.
The building, which dates from between 1500BC and 1200BC, was unearthed on the Shetland island of Bressay eight years ago. It was found in the heart of the Burnt Mound at Cruester, a Bronze Age site on the coast of Bressay facing Lerwick.
But earlier this summer, because of the increased threat of coastal erosion, local historians joined archaeologists to launch a campaign to save the building and to move it somewhere safer. A third of the mound had already been lost to sea erosion.
The central structure was carefully dismantled and each stone numbered before being moved to a site a mile way next to Bressay Heritage Centre.
And today, following the completion of the unusual removal scheme, the Bronze Age building will be officially opened at its new location by Tavish Scott, the MSP for Shetland.
Douglas Coutts, the project officer with Bressay History Group, said the structure was one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made in the Northern Isles.
The building was hidden in a mound of burnt stones and is thought to have been used for feasts, baths or even saunas.
The structure comprises a series of dry-stone, walled cells, connected by two corridors. At the end of one corridor is a hearth cell, thought to have been used for heating stones, and at the other end is a tank sunk into the ground which is almost two metres long, more than a metre wide, and half a metre deep.
Mr Coutts said: “Burnt mounds don’t usually consist of very much more than a hearth and a tank and a heap of burnt stones. But in Shetland, we seem to have much more complex structures with little rooms or cells leading off from a main passageway which connects the hearth and tank.
“We have approximately 300 burnt mounds on Shetland but only four or five have been excavated and, of those, the Cruester mound is the most fascinating and complex. It looks as if it has been in use for anything between 500 to 1,000 years.”
He added: “We think these cells may have originally been roofed over in a beehive shape.
“One theory is that these structures may have been used for cooking meat or tanning hides.
“But it is possible they could have raised steam by heating the water and that these little cells could have been used as saunas.”
Tom Dawson, a researcher at St Andrews University who also worked on the removal project, said coastal erosion was threatening thousands of archaeological sites around Scotland.
“The local group here came up with a novel idea for dealing with the problem,” he said.
“It is great to have had the chance to give new life to this particular site and make it accessible to future generations, while also learning something new, not just about Cruester, but about burnt mounds in general.
“This structure is important in world terms. There are thousands of burnt mounds in Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia but only a handful are known to have structures within them.”
Mr Scott praised the partnership between the local history group and outside archaeological bodies.
He said: “This exhibition will be a great asset for visitors to Bressay and local people. The more we understand about the past, the better informed we are about the future.”
From IOM Today
ARCHAEOLOGISTS may have unearthed evidence of a prehistoric tragedy at Isle of Man Airport.
They are working on a theory that fire could have razed a Bronze Age village to the ground in a cataclysmic conflagration in the area known as Ronaldsway.
Prehistoric remains including three human skeletons, discovered during earthworks for the airport runway extension project, made headlines around the world.
The excavations have been completed some two weeks ahead of schedule and the site, equivalent to about 20 football pitches, cleared ready for construction work to resume.
It was initially thought that pottery fragments, found under the route of a proposed taxiway extension in the north east of the airfield, dated back some 4,000 years to the late neolithic era.
But following a further study of the artefacts, experts from Lancaster-based Oxford Archaeology North have provisionally revised that chronology by some 500 years.
It is now believed that what has been uncovered is a further part of a Bronze Age settlement first discovered when the runway was built in the 1930s.
Several of the half-dozen circular structures unearthed at the site featured charred earth indicating evidence of burning.
The experts now believe these are Bronze Age homes dating back 3,500 years that appear to have burnt down.
Two cairns, in which were found the human skeletons, appear to be slightly more recent. One of the burials contained fragments of a ring or bangle which had been worn around the upper arm.
Andrew Johnson, field archaeologist at Manx National Heritage, said: ‘We now think these circular structures are Bronze Age homes. It certainly seems possible that some of these buildings have in some way been burnt down.
‘The site stretches from a south west to a north east direction and it does seem likely that if fire took hold in the south west then, given the direction of the prevailing wind, the possibilities of disaster are obvious. It’s an interesting speculation.
‘The cairns appear to have been built slightly later, potentially after the conflagration. Perhaps in what psychologists would now describe as a process of closure, the settlement’s use was changed from a living community to a place of the dead.‘
Hundreds of pottery shards and pieces of worked flint were recovered, together with domestic rubbish in the form of shellfish and bones.
Mr Johnson said the age of the remains had been revised after a much more detailed look at the pottery fragments. Radiocarbon dating may be used to get a more accurate date for the human skeletons.
He said: ‘We are certainly not disappointed that we are now looking at Bronze Age rather than neolithic remains, absolutely not. Slight revision of working theories goes with the territory.
‘This dig has been an enormous success in terms of working with the airport and the construction team. It has been quite a difficult job but everyone involved in it can feel justifiably proud.
‘By providing a body of new evidence on the Bronze Age period, it will probably contribute several important pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. But it also gives us an opportunity to completely reassess the excavation that took place in the 1930s when the site was being developed as an airfield. It will take us forward some significant distance.‘
All artefacts have been removed for study and conservation and a preliminary report will be prepared by Oxford Archaeology. It is likely that the team will return in the spring when construction work moves to the eastern end of the airport where the promontory is to be built out to sea.
Airport director Ann Reynolds said: ‘I understand that no archaeological project of this scale and complexity has been undertaken in the Island before in the course of a major construction contract. It has been a major achievement for all concerned.‘
Mrs Reynolds confirmed the runway project had not been delayed and was scheduled for completion by December 2009.
From the Derry Journal
An ancient underground chamber which could date back 2,000 years has been unearthed near Clonmany in Inishowen.
Discovered by Clonmany man Sean Devlin, the previously unrecorded structure appears to be an underground tunnel or souterrain.
Mr Devlin revealed yesterday that he first discovered the underground chamber several years ago while landscaping his front garden, but didn’t make much of a fuss about his amazing find at the time. The historic significance of the tunnel only became apparent recently after Mr Devlin showed it to amateur archaeologist friends.
“I knew it was an exciting find and I did show it to some people but never to any real experts,” Mr Devlin, owner of Devlin’s Fireplaces in Bridgend, told the ‘Journal’. “I had been doing my lawn and dug it out accidentally with a digger. It was a big round circle with a tiny dark tunnel leading off it which seems to go quite far.”
Souterrains are underground man-made drystone built structures roofed with large lintels, comprising of one or more chambers linked by tunnels called creepways. Their entrance is concealed at ground level. They are usually found in locations near to ringforts, cashels and early ecclesiastical sites. Interestingly, Clonmany means ‘the meadow of the monks’.
Mr Devlin says he may try to improve the underground chamber: “My children couldn’t believe it when we found it – it was great. And the tunnel seems structurally safe and dry so eventually I might do it up and maybe try and put some kind of lights in there to make going in there a bit easier.”
Derry man and long time amateur archaeologist Eddie Harkin, who visited and examined this fascinating structure with colleagues Tommy Gallagher and Brian MacNeachtain, confirmed that it has at least three chambers with a creepway linking each one.
In one chamber Mr Harkin says there is a quantity of bones – which may or may not be human – deposited in niches along one side of the souterrain wall. He also found part of a quern stone as well as a quantity of shells.
According to Mr Harkin, archaeologists believe that sounterrains were used as places of refuge, as many of them have defensive features such as low set lintels built into their roofs. They may have also been used for storing food. Indeed, it is possible that this souterrain continues and may be connected to the sixth century monastic site across the road.
A member of his local heritage group, Mr Devlin says he is delighted to have discovered this ancient monument in his garden and he hopes to learn more about it when an archaeologist from Dublin examines it some time soon.
From Thisiswiltshire
A SENIOR druid is gaining worldwide attention as his protest at Stonehenge continues into its second month.
Demonstrating on behalf of the Council of British Druid Orders, King Arthur Pendragon has vowed to remain at the site, living in his caravan, until the historic site is opened fully to the public.
He said: “I’ve been here five weeks now. I’m very cold and very wet but I’m staying here.”
“I’m getting a lot of response from foreign tourists. They agree with me and say it’s too expensive.”
Pendragon, 54, has been camping close to the World Heritage Site since the Summer Solstice on June 21 and is hoping his protests will encourage the Government to remove the fences around the monument, build a tunnel under the A303 and grass over the A344.
He said: “The thing that really annoys me is that not only have they spent so much money on public inquiries and doing nothing with it, but it is a sacred site. It’s not a cash-cow.”
A public inquiry was set up in 2004 to look at ways of improving the traffic flow in and around the Stonehenge area.
Among the many options that were discussed were a new dual carriageway and a 2.1km bored tunnel.
The plans were scrapped in December last year after ministers decided the costs, which had spiralled from £223m to £470, could not be justified.
From The University of Manchester:
‘Cursus’ is older than Stonehenge
Archeologists have come a step closer to solving the 285-year-old riddle of an ancient monument thought to be a precursor to Stonehenge.
A team led by University of Manchester archaeologist Professor Julian Thomas has dated the Greater Stonehenge Cursus at about 3,500 years BC – 500 years older than the circle itself.
They were able to pinpoint its age after discovering an antler pick used to dig the Cursus – the most significant find since it was discovered in 1723 by antiquarian William Stukeley.
When the pick was carbon dated the results pointed to an age which was much older than previously thought – between 3600 and 3300 BC – and has caused a sensation among archeologists.
The dig took place last summer in a collaborative project run by five British universities and funded by the Arts and Histories Research Council and the National Geographic Society.
Professor Thomas said: “The Stonehenge Cursus is a 100 metre wide mile long area which runs about 500 metres north of Stonehenge.
“We don’t know what it was used for – but we do know it encloses a pathway which has been made inaccessible.
“And that suggests it was either a sanctified area or for some reason was cursed.”
Professor Thomas believes that the Cursus was part of complex of monuments, within which Stonehenge was later constructed.
Other elements include the ‘Lesser Stonehenge Cursus’ and a series of long barrows – all built within a mile of Henge.
He added: “Our colleagues led by a team from Sheffield University have also dated some of the cremated human remains from Stonehenge itself.
“That’s caused another sensational discovery and proves that burial cremation had been taking place at Stonehenge as early as 2900 BC – soon after the monument was first built.
“But what is still so intriguing about the Cursus is that it’s about 500 years older than Henge – that strongly suggests there was a link and was very possibly a precursor.
“We hope more discoveries lie in store when we work on the Eastern end of the Cursus this summer.
“It will be a big step forward in our understanding of this enigmatic monument.”
From the Salisbury Journal:
“VANDALS used a hammer and screwdriver to damage the Hele Stone at Stonehenge between 9pm and 10pm on Thursday.
Police are appealing for witnesses after two men climbed over the fence surrounding the area and caused the damage, before driving off in a red Rover 400.
The suspects were caught on CCTV going to the stones on another day but were chased off.”
More details from The Independent
From The Telegraph:
“Archaeologists excavating an enigmatic burial mound in Sussex believe that grave robbers beat them to the prize of finding the remains of a Bronze Age chief.
Racing against time to date a burial mound on the cliffs at Peacehaven Heights in East Sussex before it collapses into the sea, they have found evidence of human occupation of the site spanning back to 8,000 years BC.
But the prize was to find the remains of the warrior chief who was placed there in the Bronze Age, when the burial mound was built some 2000-3000 years ago, around the same time as the famous stones were erected at Stonehenge.
Many such mounds were built in the Bronze Age, often in high places, to mark the burial of a local chief.
With him would have been placed grave goods such as beads, bone pins, pottery, even gold artefacts.
However, the team found pottery and a clay pipe dating from the 1700-1800s, which suggests that robbers had excavated the mound then, said Susan Birks, who has led the effort by the Brighton & Hove Archaeological Society and the Mid Sussex Field Archaeological Team.”
From BBC News:
“Archaeologists are hoping to unearth evidence of what they believe to have been one of Bronze Age Britain’s largest axe-making “factories”.
Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust (CPAT) said the axes, made from a distinctive type rock – known as picrite – had been found throughout the country.
A three-week survey at the 4,000-year-old site will start soon in Hyssington, near Welshpool, Powys.
The trust’s Chris Martin said it may have been a large industrial centre.
The trust carried out a preliminary survey last year, but it did not uncover the factory site.
However, it said test results from 2007 proved that picrite had been mined in an area known locally as Cwm Mawr, and a study in the 1950s had suggested it was an area where axes had been made.”
UPDATE: Bronze Age axes found in Powys
A HOARD of Bronze Age axes has been discovered by archaeologists.
A three-week survey is under way by Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust to find out more about the weapons’ origins. They were unearthed at a site in Hyssington, near Welshpool.
The trust said the axes were made of picrite, a type of rock mined in the area.
From icWales
From Lynn News:
“VISITORS will be taken back in time 4,000 years when (King’s) Lynn Museum re-opens to the public on Tuesday (1st April) after its £1.2 million redevelopment.
For on display for the first time will be Seahenge – the man-made timber circle found on Holme beach in 1998 which has been hailed one of Britain’s most exciting archaeological discoveries.
A new gallery has been created to show half the 55 preserved timbers from the circle and the giant upturned oak stump they surrounded, against an illuminated backdrop of Holme beach today.”
Update
Old timbers bring in new visitors
A Norfolk museum has recorded a large increase in visitors since opening a unique display of the Bronze Age wood circle known as Seahenge.
The Lynn Museum in King’s Lynn underwent a £1.2m redevelopment before the exhibition was opened last month.
Norfolk Museums Service said 1,500 visited in its opening month, 73% more year-on-year before the display opened.
From The Architects’ Journal:
English Heritage (EH) has confirmed it is looking at resuscitating previous visitor-centre proposals following the recent demise of Denton Corker Marshall’s (DCM) £67 million scheme.
A spokeswoman for EH told the AJ: ‘We are looking at all the old schemes and a [Cullinan] scheme is a possibility.
She added: ‘We have to move fast and we are looking at what we already have.‘
Robin Nicholson, practice director at Edward Cullinan Architects, said: ‘As soon as the other scheme (DCM) began to move into the sand we wrote to EH saying to them that there was no doubt that Larkhill is the best site – whoever does it.
‘The site is 1km north of the stones and the great thing is that you can see Stonehenge from the roof of the building but you can’t see the building from the stones.
EH wants the centre to be up and running by 2012 to cater for the expected invasion of tourists arriving on the back of the London Olympics. EH will have ‘critical meetings in late January and February’ with stakeholders and representatives from UNESCO.
“ENGLISH Heritage will not stop the Rotherwas access road being built, the Hereford Times can reveal.
Advisors from English Heritage have decided they are happy with Herefordshire Council’s plans to continue building the road over the archaeological discovery, termed the Rotherwas Ribbon, which dates back to the same period as Stonehenge.
Scientific advisors from the organisation have recommended that the engineering solution proposed by the council will provide long-term protection for the archaeological find.
Work to preserve the Ribbon under layers of protective membranes and sand has already begun and further work can now be carried out.
English Heritage is also considering financial support for further archaeological excavations outside of the road corridor to enable the Ribbon’s history to be more fully understood.
Despite the advice from English Heritage, councillors still have to consider a range of options to discuss how the Bronze Age monument can be best safeguarded for future generations.
These include abandoning the road, which the council says would cost £6 million, building a bridge at the cost of £10 million, or creating a £110 million tunnel underneath the Ribbon.
If any of these options are approved council officers are warning that the county faces serious financial challenges and other important projects would be halted.
Instead, officers are recommending that the building of the road continues, at a cost of £400,000, and that the existing find is protected, in line with archaeological best practice.
Additionally, the presumed course of the Ribbon, both north and south of the access road, should be investigated to ensure opportunities for tourism, heritage and education are explored.
The council stopped work on the road around the site of the Ribbon earlier this year when the significance of the find was established.
Plans to protect it were initially put on hold after public demands to see it – around 1,000 people were given escorted tours during July.”
From the Hereford Times
“A landowner, one of his tenants and a local trader were ordered to pay £15,065 in fines and costs for illegally dumping huge amounts of waste on land designated as a Scheduled Ancient Monument. The case was brought by the Environment Agency.
In March 2006, the Environment Agency became aware that a significant amount of waste was dumped on land at an ancient hillfort at Tunley, three miles south west of Bath.
This is close to Tunley Farm, where the farm buildings have been converted to business units, owned by Stephen Jones, who visits weekly from Wales to collect rent from the traders.
The waste consisted of construction and demolition waste including concrete, tarmac, bricks, blocks, subsoil, metal, fluorescent light tubes, electrical cable, asbestos sheets. Environment Officers also found larger items like an electric cooker, a metal three drawer filing cabinet and a wooden staircase.
A scheduled ancient monument is a nationally important site, given legal protection by inclusion on a list. Appropriate management is therefore essential to ensure that they survive in good condition.”
“It might not have the instant impact of modern graffiti but a mammoth carved on to a wall in Cheddar Caves 13,000 years ago is being hailed as one of the most significant examples of prehistoric art ever found in Britain.
The carving – a little larger than a man’s hand, is only the second piece of representational cave art found in Britain, and contemporary with the golden age of cave art in Europe.
Britain had a flourishing Stone Age culture but, unlike prehistoric sites in France and Spain, no cave paintings or carvings had been found until recently, when the discovery of Stone Age carvings of animals and humans at Creswell Crags, near Sheffield, launched a new hunt for prehistoric cave art.
Graham Mullan and Linda Wilson, of Bristol University, have spent several years minutely examining various Cheddar Caves for almost imperceptible carvings, using sophisticated new lighting techniques.
So far they have uncovered geometrical carvings in Long Hole, and the 13,000-year-old mammoth in Gough’s Cave. Experts believe the carving, in an isolated niche, may have been used by tribal shamans in religious rituals.
It lies beyond the main living area of the Stone Age tribe who inhabited the cave.
It takes an expert eye to see the carving which has just gone on show to the public. The creature’s huge tusks are the clearest feature.
Cheddar Caves director Hugh Cornwell said: “We’ve got to hand it to Graham and Linda.
“They looked closely at rock faces which had only been glanced at by previous archaeologists, and have come up with some very exciting finds.
“Gough’s Cave has always been one of Britain’s most important prehistoric sites, and inhabited for more than 1,000 years by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
“The country’s first evidence of cannibalism was found here, and also Britain’s oldest complete skeleton, Cheddar Man.
“The mammoth carving was found just beyond the daylight zone, where our ancestors ate and slept.
“It may have been a secret inner chamber, only used by shamans to invoke their animal gods. Now, thanks to special lighting and a small display, all our customers can walk in and admire our mammoth. He’s a lovely little chap – a wonderfully spirited carving with enormous tusks.”
Speaking from his home in Bristol Mr Mullan said: “This is certainly a significant find. Before the discovery of the Creswell Crags carvings, I was one of the people who argued that there was nothing of the kind in this country at all.
“This shows that the people of Cheddar were doing the same sort of thing as their contemporaries in France.
“Some people are even suggesting that the work at Cheddar is so similar to that at Creswell Crags that it must have been carried out by the same people.”
The carvings pre-date the famous Cheddar Man skeleton by 4,000 years. Caves spokesman Bob Smart, said: “The mammoth dates from the golden age of cave art in Europe, but by the time of Cheddar Man, who died 9,000 years ago, it seems they had moved on to other forms of art and religion.”
Visitors enthused by the spirit of their ancestors can study the mammoth and then walk across the road to try their own hand at cave art in the Cheddar Caves Museum of Prehistory, built in the house formerly owned by Richard Gough, the Victorian who rediscovered Gough’s Cave.”
From the Western Daily Press:
westerndailypress.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=146238&command=displayContent&sourceNode=146064&contentPK=18105499&folderPk=100268&pNodeId=145795
Unearthing hidden treasures at Ormaig
“An open day was held at the Ormaig rock art site looking over Loch Craignish on Saturday to display the work of the recent excavation project. The project is a joint effort with the Forestry Commission and Kilmartin House Museum with Dr Andy Jones from the Archaology department at the University of Southampton casting his expert eye on proceedings.
The Forestry Commission are felling the trees around the site next year so the project is trying to discover the extent of the site to ensure it is preserved properly in the future and not damaged in the process of felling.
The excavation so far has found some hammer stones which might have been used for making tools rather than as tools themselves. It has also uncovered some more cup and ring marks typical of the area.
Dr Jones said:’We have found a lot of new motifs and hammer stones inserted into cracks and fissures on the rocks. There’s a good chance we’ll find more. Whenever we work on a project with rock art we usually find something else.’ ”
Argyllshire Advertiser, 20 July 2007
“Years of campaigning are finally over for protestors at Stanton Moor as a deal to save the site from quarrying has been approved.”
Matlock Mercury article.
From BBC News:
Archaeologists have published findings of an important Bronze Age settlement at Manchester Airport.
The dig, which was part of the multi-million pound development of Runway 2, uncovered Early Bronze Age artefacts at Oversley Farm in Styal.
The finds – which include flint arrowheads, pottery and tools – will go on display at Chester Museum.
Experts at the dig said they had made a ‘significant discovery’ about pre-historic life in Cheshire.
The site is the first excavated example of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age life in the county and the details have been published in a report by archaeologist Dan Garner.
Pottery pieces
The artefacts were discovered during runway redevelopment works
Speaking about the finds, Mr Garner said: “The building of the second runway at Manchester Airport created a unique opportunity to excavate a 3km long corridor.
“We made some exciting finds such as Bronze Age pottery, a tanged flint arrowhead and other tools and, of course, the footprint of the farmstead.
“We were very pleased to discover a prehistoric site of regional significance.”
The artefacts have been radiocarbon dated to confirm their authenticity.
Manchester Airport supported the archaeological investigations as part of a £17m package of environmental works.
The report is available from British Archaeological Reports (B.A.R).
National Trust press release:
The National Trust is advising people wishing to come to Avebury for Summer Solstice this year to arrive by public transport. In order to comply with an Enforcement Notice served on the Trust by Kennet District Council, the Trust regrets that it will be unable to open its Avebury visitor car park for Summer Solstice this year as an overnight site for campervans, motorhomes or caravans.
The Enforcement Notice, which came into force on 1 January this year, obliges the Trust to stop tolerating the occupation of the car park for overnight stays at pagan observances. In order to comply with the enforcement notice the Trust has had no choice but to apply for planning permission to install a height barrier at the car park, which will prevent the entrance of caravans and motorhomes, which are specifically cited in the Enforcement Notice.
The height barrier will prevent all high-sided vehicles from entering the car park, irrespective of their use, as the Trust cannot and would not discriminate against one group of people at one particular time of year.
Brendan McCarthy, Regional Director for the National Trust commented: “While we deeply regret having to take this decision, it is the only way that we can comply with the terms of the notice. Unfortunately, there is no suitable alternative site for overnight camping this year, so we are advising people not to travel to Avebury with camper vans, motorhomes or caravans for this solstice and, due to the limited nature of car parking, to consider coming on public transport.”
“We are committed to ensuring access to Avebury for those who wish to worship at Solstice and other important times of year. We are endeavouring to remedy the camping and parking facilities for future years.”
There will be a very limited number of car parking spaces available at a charge (for vehicles under 2.1 m high) on the evening of Solstice itself, Wednesday 20 June. There will be no additional car parking for people arriving in the days before and after Solstice evening itself.
For the past ten years, until January 2007, the Trust, with the knowledge of the local planning authority, has allowed the pagan community to park their motorhomes and vans in the car park at pagan observances to alleviate the potential knock on effect of camping elsewhere in the village or within the World Heritage Site.
The National Trust is still working towards a medium-term solution to parking and camping at Avebury. The National Trust has presented its options appraisal, which includes nine potential sites identified by the Trust, to Kennet District Council with regard to the future of car parking and overnight stays during pagan observances at Avebury. The appraisal will form the basis of an ongoing consultation process with stakeholders on how best to work towards a consensual and sustainable solution to these twin issues.
Any solution needs to balance the interests of Avebury’s disparate groups as well as protect the archaeology of the World Heritage Site, minimise disruption to the village, ensure access for worship for the pagan community and conform with police concerns over traffic flows.
In the long term, the National Trust remains committed to removing vehicles from within the World Heritage Site.
Update from the Western Daily Press:
‘WARLIKE PAGANS’ UP IN ARMS AT CAR CRACKDOWN
The National Trust has called on solstice-goers to stay away from the West’s biggest stone circle this summer because of an ongoing row with council chiefs.But the new stance at Avebury in Wiltshire has sparked anger among “radical” pagan groups, and some have warned trouble could be in store for this June’s event.
National Trust chiefs say they have to abide by tough new planning regulations from council chiefs which effectively end the free-for-all in the village at solstice time.
For years local residents have complained of disruption, all-night parties, noise, anti-social behaviour, traffic and parking problems in the days either side of the important midsummer festival.
And, even though Stonehenge has been opened for the solstice night for more than five years, the popularity of Avebury has mushroomed in recent years.
Village opposition and council action has focused on the National Trust-owned car park on the edge of the village, which becomes an unofficial campsite and traveller camp for a week around the solstice. The trust has been forced to ban campervans and will probably have to ban tents too. Those new rules, and tough police action over parking, mean that it will be difficult for people to park anywhere in Avebury. So yesterday, they sent out a stark message for the first time – go by bus or do not go at all.
Trust regional director Brendan McCarthy said: “We know we can’t put a fence around Avebury or restrict access to it, but clearly the current situation can’t continue.
He said: “There are bound to be people who will come regardless, but we want the message to go out there that this car park fills up quickly, they won’t be able to stay here or park anywhere else.
“Our hands are tied by the council’s actions but we recognise the knock-on effect the solstice has on the residents here. The simple message is we’d rather thousands of people didn’t come but if they do they should come by bus,” he added.
Druid Terry Dobney, Avebury’s keeper of the stones, said radical pagans were far from happy with the move.
He said: “People decide to come for the solstice often at the last minute and I feel sorry for the spontaneous people who will find it very difficult.”
Resident and district councillor Gretchen Rawlings said: “Everyone is very concerned about what will happen at solstice time and I don’t know what the solution is. Nothing will stop people coming and it has to be properly managed.”
All sides in the dispute are now working on setting up a park-and-ride scheme for the event, and investigating a long-term solution for the years to come.
“English Heritage today welcomed the Government’s decision to grant planning permission for new visitor facilities at Stonehenge.”
Full story:
Wiltshire Times
English Heritage