Bronze Age
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The fenland around Peterborough is a liminal place, a world of still, deep water, rustling reeds, flat land and a big sky. A place full old legends of the Lantern Man and the Toad Man and the spectral dogs known as Black Shuck. A place full of memories, of hidden secrets… In 1999, a major…
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I begin to think the only area in this country devoid of meaningful buried treasure is my back garden! The latest amazing discovery on a Bronze Age axe hoard by a detectorist is not only astonishing for itself, but made even more so because she’s only thirteen and this was only her third dig!…
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I have just watched the first episode of Bone Detectives: Britain’s Buried Secrets, featuring Dr Tori Herridge and the delightful Raksha Dave, whom I remember from Time Team, but who is now much in TV evidence. In this new series we’re promised episodes from different periods and different places all over Britain, but this first…
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Here are Historic England’s ten top archaeological discoveries of the decade. Needless to say, the discovery of Richard III’s remains figures high on the list. He’d been thought to have been buried in Leicester Greyfriars…or maybe thrown into the River Soar! But no, Greyfriars was the place. However, what I didn’t know was that Greyfriars…
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NEW BONES FROM THE TOWER–HOW LONG BEFORE THEY BLAME RICHARD FOR THESE TOO?
“Princes”, Anne Neville, Beaker Era, Bronze Age, Charles II, denialists, Edward of Warwick, Elizabeth Roberts, Elizabeth Woodville, First Battle of St. Albans, George Duke of Clarence, Henry Pole the Younger, Henry VII, human remains, Jane Shore, John Ashdown-Hill, John Everett Millais, Margaret of Salisbury, mtDNA, Osteology, radio carbon dating, Richard III, Tower of London, Weir, Will SlaughterRecently, archaeologists working at the Tower of London discovered the remains of two people, an adult woman age 35-45 and a child of about seven. Proper modern carbon dating has taken place and it is determined that the pair are from between 1450-1550. Osteological examination shows no signs of trauma on the bones, although the…
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Britain’s top burial sites?
“Princes”, Anglo-Saxons, Bronze Age, Dartmoor, DNA evidence, Henry I, human remains, Iron Age, John Ashdown-Hill, Kings of Essex, Leicester dig, Oxfordshire, Philippa Langley, Pocklington, Prince of Prittlewell, Reading Abbey, Repton, Richard III, Richard III reburial, Seaxa, Southend Museum, Tutankhamun, Vikings, Westminster Abbey, WhitstableThis Sun article, which originally confused Richard’s Leicester with Henry I’s Reading, lists what they consider to be Britain’s top burial sites, although there is no detail on the supposed “Princes” in that urn, especially now that there is evidence to test the remains. Are there any others you might have included?
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Recently I came across this fascinating blogpost by an archaeologist called Katharina, who was working on a Bronze Age burial site in Austria. The skeletons her team excavated have recently been DNA tested–and one of them carried the maternal haplogroup J1c2, which is part of the group to which Richard belonged. Richard’s Bronze Age foremother?…
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What is it about carparks? They seem to hide a wealth of archaeology. My own local one may not have held a king, but it certainly contained burials–a handful of Bronze Age people who had been cremated and buried in long-vanished barrows strung out along what once was a prominent ridge. Several thousand years…
The New Murrey and Blue blog 