For more than 20 years, Cambridge Archaeological Unit has been excavating fields lining either side of the Great Ouse, at Barleycroft Farm and Over, in the Cambridgeshire Fens. This cluster of ancient mid-river islands and ridges turns out to house surprising secrets: they seem to have been the focus of some intriguing Iron Age mortuary […]

This month CA turns 50 and we are taking the opportunity to celebrate. Alongside the usual array of fascinating archaeological discoveries, we have sprinkled a selection of offerings with an anniversary theme. Our special wraparound cover pays homage to the very first issue, giving a modern and CA 1-style treatment to the excavations at the […]

The museum at Norton Priory, an extensively excavated monastic site in Cheshire, reopened last summer after a major programme of redevelopment and expansion. Lucia Marchini pays a visit. Excavation of the Augustinian priory founded at Norton in 1134 began under Patrick Greene (CA 31). In 1971, a team of local volunteers and prisoners set to […]

The great archaeological bake-off   Thank you to all of you who entered our competition to bake CA a 50th birthday cake. Your creations looked fantastic. The winner is Hazel Mosley, with this detailed depiction of an archaeologist taking a break with CA 310 (typically, all the finds are hidden under the spoil heap!). Thanks to our friends at Oxbow Books for providing […]

In a major new volume on the archaeology of Pembrokeshire, Tim Darvill argues that monument typologies do not help us understand how people viewed rocks and the landscape in the past. We need to think less like archaeologists and start asking questions about the meaning of stone and what these monuments might have signified to […]

What can the glittering weapon fittings from the Staffordshire Hoard tell us about the Anglo-Saxon warrior elite? Lucia Marchini went along to the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery’s latest exhibition to find out. It is a story familiar to many, and a find that has often graced the pages of this magazine (see CA 236, […]

How should we study ancient stone monuments? In the past, great ingenuity has been expended on cataloguing them according to ever more intricate typologies. Now a survey of Neolithic monuments in Pembrokeshire is applying simpler classifications and focusing on what these edifices meant to the communities that raised them. The results raise questions about how efforts to clear the first farming land […]

A fine example of a Roman villa with well-preserved mosaics has been discovered in Dorset and excavated by a group of amateur archaeologists. Lilian Ladle described the preliminary results to Andrew Selkirk. Is it possible to do an ‘amateur’ dig these days? At Druce Farm in Dorset, Lilian Ladle has been excavating a rather splendid […]

Our cover feature takes us inside a well-appointed Roman villa in Dorset. There we find many of the sumptuous, if occasionally garish, decorative touches favoured by the elites in Roman Britain. Alongside the mosaics, painted wall plaster, and showy roofing are more intimate details. One mosaic had to be patched after it was worn down, […]

The latest exhibition at the British Museum offers an overview of South African art from manuports to Mandela and beyond. Lucia Marchini finds out more. Between 1948 and 1994, when the ruling National Party was enforcing apartheid legislation, the official version of South African history portrayed the country as a terra nullius before European settlement […]