Archaeology – Cambridge Core Blog

Did the Iron Age death ritual involve wild bird sacrifice? Was Roman Cirencester named ‘Cironium’ not ‘Corinium’? What can we learn from the Monastic Foundation at Anglo-Saxon Lyminge in Kent? The latest volume of The Antiquaries …

Back in spring 2008 the new Doctor Who was entering its fourth season. David Tennant was the Doctor, Catherine Tate was his companion Donna, and Pompeii was the destination of their first journey through time…

Stephen Mitchell is Honorary Secretary of the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA). He brings us the latest from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük. Çatalhöyük is the flagship of the excavation programme in Turkey supported by…

August 19th 2014 marks two thousand years since the death of the Roman emperor Augustus. The commemorations may not be as lavish as in 1938, when the Italian government celebrated the bi-millennium of his birth…

The 2014 volume of The Antiquaries Journal is now available online. In this blogpost, the journal’s Assistant Editor, Christopher Catling, provides a summary of four articles from the volume, which you can download and share at no…

A long-lost cast of the skull of Bede – the ‘Father of English History’ – has been rediscovered within the anatomical collections of the University of Cambridge. Jo Story and Richard Bailey’s findings have been…

Archaeological evidence shows that intestinal parasites such as whipworm became increasingly common across Europe during the Roman Period, despite the apparent improvements the empire brought in sanitation technologies. The Romans are well known for introducing…

Peter Wiseman, University of Exeter, discusses his forthcoming article ‘Maecenas and the Stage’, which is due to be published in Papers of the British School at Rome later this year.

As a subscriber to Anatolian Studies for forty years, I am a loyal reader and very familiar with the academic literature and specialist studies about the antiquities of Turkey, but by any standards the 2016 volume of the journal must count as one of the best ever.

Eleanor Robson, Editor of Iraq Over the past few months, the Iraqi armed forces and their allies have freed substantial areas of northern Iraq from ISIS/Da’esh, liberating many hundreds of thousands of people from the terrorists’ control.…

This month marks the official liberation of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, after more than three years of horrifying occupation by ISIS/Da’esh.…

Ran Zhang, of Durham University, discusses his recent paper ‘A Chinese Porcelain Jar Associated with Marco Polo: A Discussion from an Archaeological Perspective‘.…

The editors of Advances in Archaeological Practice are delighted to share with you the first issue in the journal’s sixth volume year.…

The study “A mawsoniid coelacanth (Sarcopterygii: Actinistia) from the Rhaetian (Upper Triassic) of the Peygros quarry, Le Thoronet (Var, southeastern France)” by Uthumporn Deesri et al., recently published in Geological Magazine, presents and describes for the first time fossil evidence for a mawsoniid coelacanth recently unearthed from a quarry in southeastern France.…

The Society for American Archaeology’s paper of the month for February comes from Advances in Archaeological Practice and is entitled: ‘Strategies for International Travel with “High-Tech” Archaeological Field Equipment’.…

Women held an extraordinary position in Aztec society. Through their connection to the earth through childbirth, they were believed to wield primal forces which gave them both access to awesome power and the potential for catastrophic disruption.…

Biodiversity hotspots and gradients are a striking feature across the globe today. While the Latitudinal Diversity Gradient is the best known of these biodiversity patterns, strong gradients in species richness also exist in relation to topography and habitat heterogeneity.…

The Society for American Archaeology’s paper of the month for April comes from Latin American Antiquity and is entitled: ‘Es Complicado: 1.260 Años de Tumbas de Tiro y Cámara en el Noroeste de Jalisco, México’.…

The Society for American Archaeology’s paper of the month for April comes from Latin American Antiquity and is entitled: ‘Estrategias Humanas, Estabilidad Y Cambio en la Frontera Agricola Sur Americana’.…

Imagine if, many millions of years ago, dinosaurs drove cars through cities of mile-high buildings. A preposterous idea, right? Over the course of tens of millions of years, however, all of the direct evidence of a civilization—its artifacts and remains—gets ground to dust. How do we really know, then, that there weren’t previous industrial civilizations on Earth that rose and fell long before human beings appeared? It’s a compelling thought experiment, and one that Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, take up in a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

Latest Images