It is always a little dangerous to revisit old friends. What will they be like? Will you still like them when you have not seen them for a long time? It was with some trepidation that I returned to Oxford for the opening of the new Ashmolean Museum on 28th October after a major rebuilding [...]

One should not start a project that one cannot complete. Having started writing a blog on the first day of my pilgrimage to Hadrian’s Wall I must confess that I failed to keep it up. It was not for lack of trying. Every night in my room I wrote up my diary, often over 2000 [...]

The Hadrian’s Wall pilgrimage is going well.  The Pilgrimage is one of the great events of British archaeology.  It began in 1849 when a group of young men decided they would ‘walk the wall’ and it has continued every 10 years since then except for the war years: this is now the 13th pilgrimage. For [...]

  In view of the current debate about the rights and wrongs of suicide, Terry Jones in his recent book on ‘Barbarians’ provides some interesting background material. The Christian doctrine about suicide, he argues,  goes back to St Augustine’s attack on the Donatists: “In the early fifth century, very large numbers of poor African Romans [...]

If your accounts for the year are not quite as good as you might wish— if, for instance, you make a loss of £2.5m on a turnover of £1.6m – how do you convey the news to your members?The past year has been one when many organisations have had accounts that are less satisfactory than [...]

How does Heritage Link work? Heritage Link is a strange organisation that aims to help heritage charities work better. It presents an image of the utmost political correctness, so as the AGM was to be held just round the corner from me at the old Hampstead Town Hall, I decided to go along and find [...]

The Council for Independent archaeology is holding its annual get-together at Monmouth on Saturday the 30th August, and all archaeologists are invited to attend.

A new exhibition on Hadrian has just opened at the British Museum. At the same time, an exhibition on Skeletons has opened at the Wellcome Collections. Current Archaeology has visited them both. We report back

At the Brading Roman Villa in the Isle of Wight, new excavations are being planned by Barry Cunliffe and Michael Fulford. As we were recently in the Isle of Wight, we went along to see what it was all about.

The next issue of Current Archaeology  will be devoted to the work of one of the world’s great museums – the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. The Penn Museum is one of the world’s greatest museums. Every year, expeditions are sent out  round the world, and many of the great discoveries are made by [...]

Just how popular is archaeology? Over the May Day holiday, I took part in two very different events with two very different answers.

O G S Crawford was one of the greatest figures of 20th century Archaeology, but why did he fall in love with Marxism and spend the rest of his life in disillusionment? Here we review a major new biography which reveals the hidden story of his life.

After a gap of some forty four years, Stonehenge is once again being excavated. Admittedly, this time it is only a very small hole, and is only being dug for a fortnight, but it is a very important hole, and on April the 9th, we were invited down to Stonehenge to inspect it.

A monstrous regiment of women is taking over. On Friday 3rd April the women held an all-day conference at the Antiquaries where over 100 women spent the day plotting. Your intrepid Editor-in-Chief  gate-crashed the drinks party in the evening. Did he survive to tell the tale?