What do we really know about the Vikings? Yes, they raided, and they hoarded (as illustrated by our richly tangled cover shot). But what cultural footprint did they leave in Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland, and how does their archaeological legacy differ from place to place? Carly Hilts explores a wealth of data on the […]

All that glitters is not gold? According to the latest research  on the Staffordshire Hoard, it certainly seems so. Ongoing  investigations are revealing that sophisticated Saxon goldsmiths  had developed a technique to make their gold appear to be  rather more golden than it really was. But how did they do it?  Carly Hilts spoke with […]

What lies beneath the ground at Stonehenge? A major initiative to map the geophysics of some 12 square kilometres of surrounding landscape is now all but complete. This has revealed a startling amount of archaeology, including the footprints of hundreds of previously unknown features that range from henge-like monuments to ditches and pits. Turn to […]

This issue of CA has a watery theme. We start with Graeme Young’s account of excavating burnt mounds in the wetlands of Bamburgh in Northumberland. Are these mounds the waste from large-scale brewing or were the heated stones used to provide steam for a sauna? Next, Robert Van de Noort tells our Assistant Editor, Carly […]

When archaeologists announced they had found the body of King  Richard III beneath a car park on the site of Leicester’s Grey Friars,  it made world news. But project leader Richard Buckley’s original  plan had been simply to discover more about the friary, rating the  chance of actually finding the king’s body as close to […]

When a hole appeared in the summit of Silbury Hill, English Heritage had a crisis on their hands. As a major conservation operation swung into action, a team of archaeologists grasped this opportunity to re-enter the mound. Their remarkable discoveries have demolished views of Silbury Hill as a chieftain’s vanity project. A powerful figure may […]

An 11th-century jaunt across Lough Corrib, Co. Galway, in a sleek  logboat ended in disaster. A mishap cracked the hull open, forcing  the crew to abandon both their boat and the Viking-style war  axes stowed on board. Now survey of the Lough has revealed  that this vessel was neither the first, nor the last to […]

What are the origins of the classic English village? Once believed to be an Anglo-Saxon or Viking import, the appearance of this quintessential countryside feature is increasingly looking like a post-Norman Conquest imposition. So what did the Anglo-Saxon equivalent look like? Tapping into the wealth of information flowing from developer-funded archaeology, John Blair has been […]

On the 10th February, under a cloak of secrecy, the remarkable  artefacts in the Staffordshire Hoard were reunited for the first  time since they were scattered by a plough strike. This helped  specialists studying the vast Anglo-Saxon jigsaw puzzle to match up  fragments that once adorned the same items. It is now known that decorations […]

When Martin Bates left his geophysical equipment to take its readings and wandered down to the beach at Happisburgh he made a remarkable discovery. An old clay bed recently exposed by the sea was pockmarked with footprints. This trail has proven to be the earliest trace of a human journey in Europe, providing a powerful […]