In CA 237 I reported on the re-opening of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Now it is the turn of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, best known for its pictures and magnificent porcelain collection. But there is also an important antiquities department on the ground floor, which has just received a complete overhaul. The big [...]
Review: The Fitzwilliam’s Greco-Roman galleries, Cambridge
April 1, 2010 By Filed Under: Andrew Selkirk
World's oldest butter; Colourful swear words; Regional accents thriving; the tough life of northern women
March 21, 2010 By Filed Under: Chris Catling
Great Scott! World’s oldest butter There are two ways to write an archaeological news story that are best avoided (but frequently deployed): claiming that something is the oldest example of its kind – or the earliest (which amounts to the same thing). So when the press reported that the ‘oldest butter in the world had [...]
Treasure found in river; Listing for seaside shelter; Farewell to Claude Lévi-Strauss; The Big Issue, The Archers
February 21, 2010 By Filed Under: Chris Catling
Treasure found in river Seeing the headline ‘Treasure found in river’, most Current Archaeology readers would probably think ‘Bronze Age deposition’, but this haul of loot, found by amateur divers Trevor and Gary Bankhead on the bed of Durham’s River Wear, are of a more recent vintage. In the course of the 300 dives conducted, [...]
Magic and Mining at Alderley Edge
January 28, 2010 By Filed Under: Chris Catling, Features
Listening to tales told by his blacksmith grandfather in the semi-darkness of his fire-lit forge, Alan Garner absorbed the Cheshire folklore that he then transformed into a classic work of fiction – The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Inspired by Garner’s story, archaeologists have recently begun to unravel the truth behind the legends of Alderley Edge, as [...]
Pee for the planet; Knickers are heritage; Lawrence of Arabia's shirt; 'An Infinity of Things'
January 21, 2010 By Filed Under: Chris Catling
Pee for the Planet Despite having a woman as its Director General, the National Trust has issued some surprisingly sexist advice on saving the planet: they want men to pee on their compost heaps. Doing so will make better fertiliser and save the water that would have been used to flush the lavatory. The result [...]
Bye bye nursery rhymes?; The ancient origins of fairy tales; From Lucy to Language; William Brown; Nighthawking
December 21, 2009 By Filed Under: Chris Catling
Bye bye nursery rhymes? The readers of the Daily Telegraph thrive on apocalyptic stories predicting the end of civilisation as we know it, usually because of a European directive – banning the sale of ‘traditional’ 100 watt light bulbs, for example, or forbidding the sale of fruit by the imperial pound (never mind that the [...]
An Interview with Martin Carver, editor of Antiquity
November 25, 2009 By Filed Under: Lisa Westcott
One of Britain’s most prolific and colourful archaeologists dishes the dirt with CA Editor Lisa Westcott. Why did you become an archaeologist? My first great loves were literature and poetry. I had no interest in archaeology until I was about 26 years old, on a military posting in Arabia, and came across a site called [...]
Gold Rush?
November 10, 2009 By Filed Under: Opinion
Will the media’s recent glamourisation of the Staffordshire Hoard’s monetary value cause a rise in illegal metal-detecting? Dr Pete Wilson puts his point of view. The discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard and the subsequent Birmingham Archaeology project to examine the findspot, undertaken in co-operation with the finder and the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) with funding [...]
Indefatigable Attenborough
November 10, 2009 By Filed Under: Lisa Westcott
On Monday, 12 October 2009, Sir David Attenborough participated in the Cambridge University Personal-Histories in Archaeology project. I was there, along with a capacity crowd of over 700 guests, to listen to one of television’s great pioneers.
Ashmolean Museum
November 9, 2009 By Filed Under: Andrew Selkirk
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 [...]
PAS annual report and the Staffordshire Hoard
November 4, 2009 By Filed Under: Lisa Westcott
I attended the launch yesterday of the 2007 Portable Antiquities Scheme annual report. Held at the BM in the new temporary exhibit space housing the few objects from the Staffordshire Hoard that are on display to the public, the meeting was full of the usual luminaries as well as Fred Johnson and his wife – [...]
Rome: a Barbarian's Perspective
October 28, 2009 By Filed Under: Andrew Selkirk
When I went on holiday this year, I took with me some archaeological books for a little light reading. One of them was particularly interesting: Barbarians: an alternative Roman History by Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, which is the book of the television series and is published by BBC Books. It is based on a [...]
Teenage girls; Galileo; early navigators; recession; guidebooks
September 30, 2009 By Filed Under: Chris Catling
Teenage girls wed old men shockIt sounds like a salacious headline from one of the red-tops, but actually this story comes from the ultra-respectable Antiquaries Journal, whose just-published Volume 89 reveals that young brides, only just old enough to be legally wed, were routinely married to old men not quite on their deathbeds (because they [...]
Antiquities: fake, looted or just lost?
September 29, 2009 By Filed Under: Opinion
The Los Angeles Times recently reported (29 May 2009) that eBay has reduced the demand for looted antiquities. The story is based on the research of Charles Stanish (University of California) who has been studying the online trade in antiquities.
Morris and the Prince – and much more
September 15, 2009 By Filed Under: Chris Catling
Morris and the PrinceHaving just written a new guide to Kelmscott Manor, your diarist has a growing admiration for William Morris, whose country home this was. Morris was a true radical, and his ideas continue to reverberate, having now caused a rift between HRH The Prince of Wales and the Society for the Protection of [...]
Hadrian's Wall Pilgrimage – again
September 4, 2009 By Filed Under: Andrew Selkirk
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 [...]
BIN09: Digging at Binchester
August 11, 2009 By Filed Under: Lisa Westcott
‘BIN09′ is the site code for this year’s season of the major new field project at the Roman fort of Binchester, run jointly by Durham County Council, Durham University and Stanford University, where I have just spent a week digging. In addition to the on-site professional staff (Dr David Mason, David Petts, Jamie Armstrong, Janice Adams and Matt [...]
The Hadrian's Wall Pilgrimage
August 10, 2009 By Filed Under: Andrew Selkirk
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 [...]
Why does the Catholic church oppose suicide?
July 31, 2009 By Filed Under: Andrew Selkirk
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 [...]
Déjà vu, Stones and bones, Sunspots and destiny, ‘Dr Livingroom, I presume?’, Mosaic funding, A hermit’s life, Leaping to the defence of the church
July 14, 2009 By Filed Under: Chris Catling
Déjà vuThe Times published a letter on 2 June 2009 signed by Professors Martin Biddle and Brian Fagan, who called on the nation not to forget the 150th anniversary of the historic lecture given by John Evans to the Society of Antiquaries on 2 June 1859, in which he presented crucial evidence for human antiquity [...]
