General and Foreign Articles
General | Foreign
Current Archaeology has a number of more general articles, dealing with subjects ranging from Aerial archaeology up in the sky, right down to the Feet on the ground
Aerial Archaeology
Aerial archaeology is one of the most important tools for the archaeologist today, and one of the foremost practitioners is Jim Pickering.
Jim Pickering learnt to fly with the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1937. He flew Spitfires throughout the Battle of Britain, and after the war became managing Director of the Family printing firm. But he continued to fly - and is still flying - and he is Britain's most prolific aerial archaeologist, with over 80,000 photos to his credit. Here we take a look at some of his latest remarkable discoveries.
Feet
An arcticle that has caused a lot of interest has been that on 'Feet'. Victorian archaeologists used to examine skulls in order to determine the typology of the skeleton. Were they, however, looking at the wrong end of the body? Phyllis Jackson is a retired chiropodist who has spent fifty years looking at Feet. Recently she has turned her attention to looking at the feet of skeletons and has been discovering just how interesting they all are. Here she explains just what she can decipher by looking at prehistoric feet, and how regional varieties of feet persist through the millennia. (CA 144)
Pen up your Kids!
How to Pen up your Kids: in North Wales special kid pens have been discovered where kids were penned in to lure in their mothers.
The Pitt Rivers awards for amateurs
In archaeology we are always looking for the unexpected. Some of the most lively and unusual archaeology is that carried out by the amateurs who can follow their own star and produce work of the highest possible standards. Two recent issues of Current Archaeology have therefore been devoted to the winners and finalists in the Pitt-Rivers Award of the British Archaeological Awards. (CA 138 and CA 145))
An Archaeological Centre at Bagshot
The Surrey Heath Archaeological and Heritage Trust took over a disused police station and turned it into an archaeological centre. They were awarded the 'Graham Webster laurels' for their work in the presentational and educational aspects of archaeology. (CA 138)
Tephra dating
One of the latest dating techniques is to analyse the tephra, produced by huge volcanic eruptions, and spread over the world. The Palaeoecology Laboratory at Queens University, Belfast is one of the foremost archaeological dating laboratories and Mike Baillie describes how they are using tephra, the volcanic dust produced in volcanic eruptions as a dating marker. (CA 134)
The Stonehenge roads
The roads that run past Stonehenge present a problem tackled with great emotions. It is once again in the news with proposals to turn the road that runs passed it into a dual carriage way: we take an objective look at the various options.
... And Foreign archaeology, too!
Our friendly colleagues on the academic journal Antiquity recently launched an Antiquity prize for the best article published during the year. The winner was Bruno David for his study of Rock Art in Australia. Chris Chippindale, the editor of Antiquity, suggested that we might like to present his work to a wider public. Here therefore Bruno David introduces Australian rock art: it is very much older than expected, and it changed its style 5000 years ago. (CA 144)
Gao
At Gao, in the Mali, evidence of the medieval town have been discovered, showing that it was once a rival to neighbouring Timbuktoo. (CA 142)
Israel
In Israel, Derrick Riley has carried out extensive aerial photography, mostly of Roman sites. Sadly he died while this article was in the press, and we include a brief obituary of the war time flier who made his career in the steel industry and then in his retirement took up flying once again and became the epitome of what can be achieved after one has officially retired. (CA 136)
France - neolithic tombs
What was the origin of megalithic tombs? The conventional wisdom suggests that they began in Brittany, but recent work in France suggests a new source: Normandy. Ian Kinnes, of the British Museum, describes some of the latest discoveries at Rots, Colombiers, and Ernes, and some of the revolutionary implications. (CA 133)
Archaeology in Italy
Italian Archaeology was the subject of a special issue of Current Archaeology, number 139. This included a number of major discoveries. The British School in Rome is currently carrying out one of the largest and most important excavations in Europe, at the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno. This was one of the largest and most important monasteries in Carolingian Europe, at a time when Charlemagne was using the monsasteries to hold his new empire together. Most of the other major monasteries are covered by later buildings, but now San Vincenzo is emerging dramatically from the ruins and has been described as 'the Pompeii of the Middle Ages'.
When did Rome become Rome? This is always a difficult question to answer as Ancient Rome is concealed under a large modern city. The best answer therefore may come from the nearby cemetery at Osteria dell' Osa. This flourished in the 9th and 8th century BC but was then abandoned when the inhabitants of the village moved to the nearby town of Gabii - at precisely the time that the villagers around Rome were moving in to the newly founded city of Rome.
We then go on to one of the greatest of modern excavations in Rome itself, those carried out by Professor Andreas Carandini at the point where the Sacra Via leads out of the Forum and up on to the Palatine Hill. Here he has uncovered a magnificent palace of late republican Rome - with a honeycomb of slaves cells underneath the dining room floor. But the earlier history runs back to the very foundations of Rome: has the very wall built by Romulus been discovered?
New discoveries about Rome come thick and fast. There's Rome's first colony at Cosa, founded in 273 BC, but never a success: it had to be constantly refounded virtually every other century, right down into the Middle Ages.
And then there's Trajan's column, now emerged gleaming white after its renovation: but were the famous friezes carved under Trajan, or under Hadrian?
And then we go down to the seaside with Pliny the Younger, and discover what a Roman seaside town looked like - now preserved in the President of Italy's private boar-hunting park, at Castelporziano.
Abandoning the Romans for a moment, Italy too has its Deserted Medieval Villages. The best known of these is Rocca San Silvestro, a mining village where many of the houses still survive up to their eaves.
Finally, the Neolithic. Neolithic Europe was dominated by three great 'religions'. The megalithic religion of the north and west, and the 'mother goddess' cult of the Balkans are well-known; now a third great religion is coming to light, the 'Hidden Religion' of Neolithic Italy. In a dramatic new book, Ruth Whitehouse tentatively reinterprets our whole way of thinking about Neolithic Europe. (CA 139)
Click here to return to the Home page