Heritage plaques Strict rules govern the erection of Blue Plaques, the circular memorial tablets in Wedgwood blue that mark the residences of celebrated historical figures. The person commemorated must have been dead for 20 years or have passed the centenary of their birth; should be considered eminent by other members of their profession or calling; […]

A group of 51 fit and battle-ready Scandinavians met a brutal death in the years between AD 910 and 1034; crudely beheaded, their remains were thrown into a mass grave near Weymouth in Dorset. Chris Catling asks how this discovery fits in with our picture of the Vikings. Recent discoveries such as the Dorset Ridgeway […]

Freudian dating parties Responding to the news that the National Trust and Mills & Boon have formed a partnership to publish bodice rippers set in historic houses, several CA readers have pointed out that the link between heritage and romance is far from new: museums and galleries have been exploiting their potential as trysting places […]

Dr Mike Heyworth, Director of the Council for British Archaeology, tells CA Editor Lisa Westcott about the CBA, pubs and politics. How did you first get involved with archaeology? When I was 14, I went along to a weekend excavation at Old Down Farm, near Andover. My main reason for wanting to go was that […]

Sexing-up the heritage Regular readers will begin to think that Sherds is obsessed with matters amorous, but in truth this is only a reflection of the extent to which the world is becoming ever more eroticised. Even Dr Who now has a feisty heroine who makes suggestive innuendoes about how long it is since the […]

Ever been had? What makes a good April Fools’ Day hoax? Certainly not the infamous spaghetti-tree documentary that was shown on Panorama in 1957, which is often cited by journalists too young to know as ‘the spoof that fooled the nation’. It didn’t, of course. A nation brought up on macaroni cheese and spag bol […]

Does civilisation start with beer? According to archaeologist Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the Neolithic Revolution was driven not by the desire for bread, rice, millet or sorghum, but by the thirst for soul food in the form of beer. In other words, we turned from the harsh and […]

The triumph of the numerologists Chairing a meeting at the Society of Antiquaries on the life of Jacquetta Hawkes recently, the Society’s President (Geoff Wainwright) observed approvingly that she had had no time for numerologists with their cabalistic papers on the ‘megalithic yard’ (the unit of measurement supposed to underlie the layout of every megalithic […]

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 […]

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 […]