British Archaeology

Volunteers are set to take part in a 12-day archaeological dig in the hope of finding signs of medieval life on a farm.

The excavation at High Tarns Farm in Silloth will begin on 22 July.

It will be led by archaeologist Mark Graham and follows his discovery of crop marks on the land, which suggest it was once the site of a large medieval building.

Mr Graham said he was "excited" but warned it could be a let down, adding: "If you're going to be an archaeologist, you better get used to disappointment."

Due to written records, archaeologists have long known that part of the town was once the site of a medieval farm linked to Cistercian monks.

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The marks looked like a "footprint of a large timber building", he said, adding: "I nearly fell off my chair."

He suspected the building was timber as the marks corresponded with holes required for large wooden posts to hold up such a structure.

No such building is detailed in maps going back to the 1800s, he added, and the marks suggest the building is about 50m (164ft) long and 20m (66ft) wide.

Mr Graham's two main theories about the potential building are that it was once a barn belonging to the Cistercian farm, or it is even older and was the home of a Viking chieftain.

"There have been houses on the scale that we're talking about excavated in Scandinavia but to find such a thing here in Cumbria would be absolutely remarkable," he said.

In an extract from her new book, A Mudlarking Year: Finding Treasure in Every Season, Lara Maiklem describes the thrill of discovering a 16th century sword on a Bankside beach.

Thursday 2 February 2022

I hear from the Museum of London today about the 'sixteenth-century bladed object' I found last year. My Excalibur moment happened at the beginning of December on a murky Saturday afternoon. I don't usually mudlark on the weekend — the foreshore is often busier and I try to keep weekends for family time — but I was in London meeting friends for lunch that day, and as I made my way back to the station, I saw the tide was low. Actually, I knew the tide was low, which is why I took the longer route along the river to the station. How could I not? I only briefly considered my new brogues, which were entirely unsuitable, before unlatching the metal gate and taking the concrete stairs down onto the foreshore at Bankside. The light was fading, and I knew I didn't have long before I lost it altogether, so I headed straight for my favourite patch. People were already there, and I could see from the footprints that it had been well searched, so I walked a little further along and that's when I saw it.

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The handle and hilt loomed out at me from a small area of gritty sand that thinly covered the mud into which the blade disappeared. What caught my eye was its regular shape and the two lines of twisted gold wire embedded in the dark brown material of the handle. The blade was only just beneath the surface, and I gently cleared away the sand until I felt the end of it with my fingers. Easing my hand carefully underneath, I lifted it free quite easily, leaving a perfect impression of where it had lain for the best part of 500 years in the dark grey mud. I held the sword aloft. Excalibur of the Thames! And looked around, but everyone had gone and there was nobody to share the moment with. The handle looked to be made of wood with a square pommel carved into the end, finished off by a four-petalled flower or quatrefoil in what I assumed was copper alloy. The blade was broken at about eight inches long and was encrusted in a thick layer of mud, pebbles and rust. When iron rusts, it often engulfs whatever is lying next to it in the mud and ends up looking like a giant caddisfly larva case. If it had been a Victorian padlock or an old horseshoe, I would have been tempted to knock the concretion off with a stone, but this was too precious.

Human bones dated to be more than 1,000 years old have been discovered in the garden of a hotel, with 24 skeletons found alongside bones belonging to a number of others.

The Anglo-Saxon remains of men, women and children were found in the grounds of The Old Bell Hotel in Malmesbury, which is next door to Malmesbury Abbey, in Wiltshire.

The remains are from 670 to 940 AD, so include the very earliest days of the abbey, when it was a monastery.

Malmesbury Abbey historian Tony McAleavy said the results are significant, especially because the place "at this time was one of the leading centres of scholarship in western Europe".

Malmesbury Abbey historian and local resident Tony McAleavy said he "was off the scale excited".

"What we've got here is not a collection of the bodies of monks - it's men, women and children," he added.

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Mr McAleavy added: "It looks like we've found traces of the community of people to helped the monks here.

"It's going to shed new light on the way Malmesbury Abbey worked in its golden age."

The University of York’s Department of Archaeology has uncovered a large timber hall in Skipsea, dating to the early medieval period, among other finds of ‘national significance’.

Measuring 6m wide and 16m long, the hall is a rare find, thought to predate the nearby Norman castle. Around the time the hall was constructed, the area is known to have been in the hands of Harold Godwinson, and later the Lords of Holderness. Its considerable size, marked out by post-holes, suggests a wealthy owner: the building was perhaps used to host celebrations and feasts, or may have welcomed visiting dignitaries.

Other structures found on the site are earlier and smaller, and Dr Jim Leary, from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, believes that they can be linked to early medieval craft-working. Among the associated finds were metalworking debris and whetstones, as well as a spindle whorl, which would indicate that textile-manufacturing was happening in the area. A partly worked jet or jet-like pendant is also evidence of early industry taking place on the site. ‘We’ll need to get the post-excavation analysis under way, and especially 14C dating, to really untangle what is associated with what,’ Dr Leary said.

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However, the archaeology being uncovered at Skipsea is not limited to the medieval period: prehistoric objects were discovered by a water channel, including two ceramic bowls and a large quantity of deer and cattle bones, which illustrates the long archaeological chronology of Skipsea’s landscape. The early history of the site was first noted by Dr Leary and Dr Elaine Jamieson, when they discovered that what was originally thought to be the motte of the Norman castle was, in fact, a reused Iron Age mound (see CA 337).

ARCHAEOLOGISTS from Dorset have discovered human remains and artefacts which give new insight into how early Britons adapted to life after the Roman invasion.

Amongst the grave goods excavated from the 2000-year-old burial pits and graves were Roman-style wine cups and flagons, which suggest that Mediterranean alcohol had become popular addition to British life around the time of the Roman conquest in AD 43.

Students and staff from Bournemouth University (BU) have been excavating Iron Age settlements at the site at Winterborne Kingston for more than fifteen years.

Whilst they have previously discovered human remains and artefacts from before the Romans arrived, these are the first finds that can tell the story of people who lived through the invasion of Dorset.

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Three graves in particular indicated the extent to which the local Durotriges tribe partially integrated into certain Roman ways of life.

The first contained the bodies of two women, aged in their thirties who had been buried together.

The student archaeologists found a roman-style wine flagon and goblets alongside the remains.

“The women were buried in the traditional Iron Age way – on their side in a foetal position. So, although the grave was dug ten to twenty years after the Romans arrived, in the mid to late first century AD, it’s clear that the local people are not becoming Roman in a big way, merely taking things from the Romans that enhance and improve their life, in this instance wine.", Dr Russell explained.

Magna, also known as Carvoran, is a Roman fort situated at the edge of the Whin Sill in Northumberland, England. The fort predates the construction of Hadrian’s Wall, strategically located on the Stanegate frontier to protect the junction of the Maiden Way with the Stanegate.

The fort was garrisoned between AD 85 and AD 122, which included the First Cohort of Syrian Archers, the Second Cohort of Dalmatians, the First Cohort of Batavians, and legionaries from the Second Augusta and the Twentieth Valeria Victrix.

Magna is under the care of the Vindolanda Trust and operates yearly outreach excavations open to the public. In the 2024 season, volunteer archaeologists have unearthed several major findings, including squamae scales, a Roman altar, ceramics, and the remains of Roman sandals.

Missing pieces of a 6th Century Byzantine bucket have been uncovered at a site world-famous for its historical discoveries.

A month-long excavation with archaeologists, conservators and volunteers from the television show Time Team has taken place at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk.

Fragments of the bucket were first discovered in 1986, with more found in 2012, the National Trust, which manages the site, said.

Further pieces have now been found and experts believed the bucket had previously been damaged and repaired.

A LAST chance to get up close to excavations at a mysterious Herefordshire archaeological site will be on offer this summer, as archaeologists work to solve a mystery.

For a final summer, members of the public will get the chance to get up close to archaeological excavations being carried out at Arthur’s Stone.

Tours of the mysterious and evocative English Heritage site in Dorstone also took place in 2022 and 2023 as part of a project to investigate early prehistoric Herefordshire, undertaken by The University of Manchester, Cardiff University and the American Institute for Field Research, in partnership with English Heritage. The project has significantly changed academic understanding of how the monument was used, and its team hope to uncover more of its secrets in 2024.

The Neolithic burial chamber comprises nine upright stones and a gigantic 25-tonne capstone. The 5,700-year-old Golden Valley site is most famous for its links to legends of King Arthur and for being a source of inspiration for the stone table in CS Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

So far, the project has started to unravel a complex sequence of changes to the monument spanning about seven centuries in the early Neolithic (3,700 – 3,000 BCE). We now know that it started as a stone chamber or ‘dolmen’ in the 37th century BCE encircled by a thick stone ring, with an entrance on the north. It was later re-oriented to face south and remodelled within a long cairn faced by drystone walls, with a false entrance between two projecting ‘horns’ of the cairn.

The archaeologists found evidence for an avenue of wooden posts leading to the new entrance which were replaced some centuries later with standing stones. It now looked more like the Long Barrows at Belas Knap and Stoney Littleton (also cared for by English Heritage). A narrow passage was built into one side of the cairn so that the old entrance could still be reached. Inside the passage they found pottery, bone, pitchstone from the Isle of Arran and rock crystal, probably brought from North Wales

Pembroke Castle has been a seat of power for centuries. It was the birthplace of Henry Tudor, father of Henry VIII, and is one of the country’s best preserved medieval strongholds, containing a maze of passages, tunnels and stairways, as well as a vast gatehouse tower. Scientists have discovered that the fortress has also been concealing a startling secret. A cave, known as Wogan Cavern, which lies directly underneath Pembroke Castle, has been found to contain a treasure trove of prehistoric material, including ancient bones and stone tools left behind by early Homo sapiens and possibly by Neanderthals.

These remains will provide key information about the settling of Britain in prehistoric times, say scientists, who last week began their first major excavation of the year at Wogan. Work on the site over coming years should provide answers to major puzzles about prehistoric Britain, including the end of the Neanderthals’ occupation about 40,000 years ago.

Early finds at Wogan include a wide range of fossils including mammoth, reindeer, and woolly rhino, as well as the remains of a hippopotamus, a species that last wallowed in British waters 125,000 years ago. Archaeologists have also found that much of the cavern’s floor is covered with a layer of stalagmite which has preserved the soil, bones, proteins and DNA that lie below.

“The site has got fantastic potential,” said Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London. “It’s the best prospect that we have got in providing fresh material that can help us find out how Neanderthals lived in Britain and learn how they were replaced by Homo sapiens.”

A team of professional and amateur archaeologists has been digging for prehistoric, Roman, medieval, and Georgian remains.

The dig at Cothelstone Farm in the Quantocks is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and gives volunteers the opportunity to learn how to excavate a site.

The site was significant to people during the Bronze Age right up until medieval times, archaeologists said.

Dan Broadbent, historic heritage officer for the Quantock Landscape Partnership Scheme, said: "What makes it so special is the idea that you have a single place looking out at this fantastic view which was clearly important for people in the past over a long period."

The scheme, alongside charity DigVentures, organised the dig after seeing aerial images of the site which showed "potential features".

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"As the story has evolved, we discovered that the ring ditch was probably visible into medieval times, the Romans would have seen it, the Anglo-Saxons would have seen it, so being able to tell that story has been very cool."

The ring ditch was likely a ceremonial site during the Bronze Age.

A number of grave slabs from England's oldest known shipwreck have been recovered by maritime archaeologists.

The remains of the 13th Century Mortar Wreck were discovered in Poole Bay, off Dorset, in 2020.

Cauldrons, cups, pottery and kitchen objects have already been brought to the surface.

A team from Bournemouth University has returned to the site to raise the carved slabs, along with stone mortars - made for grinding flour.

Dr Derek Pitman, head of archaeology at the university, said the wreck was "really well preserved".

"It was full of stone mortars and burial slabs. I've never seen anything like it," he said.

"It probably hit some choppy waters as it was leaving the harbour.

"It's a substantial ship and had a relatively large cargo."

A “lost” boulder rediscovered in a box in Salisbury Museum has provided powerful evidence that the bluestones of Stonehenge were transported from West Wales by glacier ice.

The evidence also makes it clear that the story of the transport of 80 bluestones by heroic Neolithic tribesmen, one of the great Stonehenge myths should now be dumped.

New research, published today in the International Quaternary Science Journal, describes in detail the surface characteristics of the boulder, which suggest that it has had a complex history beginning with glacial entrainment and transport in North Pembrokeshire and ending at Stonehenge with human damage in Neolithic and modern times.

Dig Alderney has discovered part of an Iron Age round house in its latest excavation.

Initially, the most recent dig had not revealed much archaeology but this latest find will offer a target for future excavations.

The team was hoping to find more evidence of Iron Age and Roman Alderney in the trio of trenches that they opened on Les Hugettes.

A pair of trenches were also positioned along Les Mielles to seek more of the large Roman building discovered in 2017.

Dr Jason Monaghan said: "What came as a surprise was the very late date of the pottery found beneath the floors of the building.

"It seems that it was not constructed until the 4th Century AD and was modified even later by the addition of crude drystone walls.

"Some of the pottery in the latest layers may prove to be post-Roman."

Other finds from this dig include 850 shards of Roman pottery with most from the 3rd and 4th Century, a bronze coin - of the Emperor Valens AD364-367 and a silver coin of Caesar Valerian II AD255.

A major research project will take place to "reach the undisturbed archaeology" at a site famous for unearthing an Anglo Saxon burial ship.

The National Trust, which owns the site, said the two-year research project at Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge, Suffolk, will aim to grow its understanding of the land.

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The excavation will be filmed by Time Team as a series exclusive for a documentary special, hosted by Sir Tony Robinson.

The project, which starts in June, will build on work carried out by Time Team in 2021 and 2023.

Mr Wainwright said previous work by Time Team identified mysterious features in Garden Field, Sutton Hoo.

"We know from previous work in this field, it’s likely we will find prehistoric flint tools and fragments of Anglo Saxon objects from burials scattered through the plough soil, but working out what the mysterious geophysical anomalies are will be our focus."

The mysterious ancient structure was first revealed in 1998 by the shifting sands of Holme-next-the-sea beach on the north Norfolk coast.

It consists of an upturned tree stump surrounded by 55 closely fitted oak posts and was originally built on the salt marsh away from the sea.

Researchers estimate it to have been built using timbers dating from 2049 BC.

The strange structure was positioned such that dunes and mud flats protected it from the sea.

A layer of peat which slowly covered the timbers also protected them from decay over thousands of years. There is a second, adjacent ring centred on two oak logs laid flat, which is also dated to the same year.

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Now, a new paper concludes that the Seahenge and the adjacent circle may have been constructed during a bitterly cold climatic period as a ritual to extend the summer and return to warmer weather.

“Dating of Seahenge timbers showed they were felled in spring, and it was considered most probable that these timbers were aligned with sunrise on the summer solstice,” archaeologist David Nance from the University of Aberdeen said.

“We know that the period in which they were constructed 4,000 years ago was a prolonged period of decreased atmospheric temperatures and severe winters and late springs placing these early coastal societies under stress,” he said.

The Seahenge’s alignment matches with sunrise on the summer solstice, suggesting it mimicked the “pen” described in folklore for an unfledged cuckoo to keep singing and extend the summer.

Archaeologists suspect that the strange monument’s structure imitates the winter dwellings of the cuckoo remembered in folklore – a hollow tree or ‘the bowers of the Otherworld’ represented by the upturned oak stump at its center.

“Summer solstice was the date when according to folklore the cuckoo, symbolising fertility, traditionally stopped singing, returned to the Otherworld and the summer went with it,” Dr Nance explained.

“The ritual is remembered in the ‘myth of the pent cuckoo’ where an unfledged cuckoo was placed into a thorn bush and the bird was ‘walled-in’ to extend the summer but it always flew away,” he said.

The other structure, according to Dr Nance, points to legends of ‘sacred kings’ who were sacrificed if misfortune fell on the community.

“Evidence suggests that they were ritually sacrificed every eight years at Samhain (now Halloween) coincident with the eight-year cycle of Venus,” he said.

“Both monuments are best explained as having different functions and associated rituals, but with a common intent: to end the severely cold weather,” Dr Nance said.

Archaeologists have discovered a Norman bridge during a dig in a West Sussex city.

Experts working in Chichester's Priory Park have uncovered the remains of a military causeway that would have led to the city's 11th Century castle.

The team from Chichester and District Archaeology Society made the discovery during an excavation in the park which is set to finish on Monday.

An open day is being held on Saturday for people to come along and hear about the finds.

An amateur detectorist has described how he unearthed a bronze age hoard, including a rare sword, after getting lost during a treasure hunters’ rally.

John Belgrave, 60, became separated from the main group of detectorists and headed to higher ground to try to spot them when he made what he has called the find of a lifetime.

His device activated as he walked along and when he dug down he uncovered a rapier sword dating back to the middle bronze age.

The 61cm (2ft) rapier had been deliberately broken into three pieces and placed in the ground alongside the remains of a wealthy landowner.

Unusually, the hilt, though cast in bronze, was shaped to mimic a wooden handle. Only two similar rapiers have been found in Britain before and they were incomplete.

As well as the rapier, a palstave axe head and a decorative arm bangle were found, presumably buried as an offering.

Dorset Museum and Art Gallery raised £17,000 to buy the objects, with the proceeds shared between Belgrave and the landowner.

Still not as good as the original series when they had TV funding, but a pretty good dig with 5 trenches.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

A study by students from the University of the Highlands and Islands has revealed that a promontory in the Loch of Wasdale in Firth, Orkney, could be the remains of an ancient crannog.

A crannog is a partially or entirely artificial island, typically built in lakes and estuarine waters of Scotland from the prehistoric period onward

Despite significant variations in methodology, most crannogs on mainland Scotland were built by driving timber piles into the loch bed and filling the interior with peat, brush, stones, or timber to create a solid foundation.

In largely treeless regions like the Western Isles, these island dwellings utilised a diverse mix of natural, artificially enlarged, or entirely artificial islets.

The discovery was made by students from the UHI Archaeology Institute, who were conducting test-pitting on a promontory at the northern end of the Loch of Wasdale.

According to a press statement by UHI: “It appears as an islet on the 1882 Ordnance Survey map. Little is known about the site, but the fact the shoreside edges appear to show the remains of walling led to the suggestion it may be a crannog.”

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The test-pitting revealed large quantities of cairn-like rubble, in addition to more structural remains or a stone surface, indicating that the entire promontory/islet is artificial.

Martin Carruthers, a lecturer at UHI, said: “A structure made up of some very large masonry seems to lurk at the heart of the cairn makeup. Constructing this ‘monument’ must have been a very substantial undertaking.”

“In terms of artefacts, apart from some later post-medieval glazed pottery, we recovered a single worked flint, probably a ‘thumbnail’ scraper, which is most likely later Neolithic in date,” added Carruthers.

Archaeologists at the Calthorpe Gardens development have found over 18,800 artefacts dating from the Prehistoric Mesolithic, Late Bronze Age-Middle to Late Iron Age, and early Anglo-Saxon times.

Local residents have been invited to view the host of discovered artefacts at a free event taking place at Banbury Town Hall on Thursday June 6, at 7pm.

.The Orbit Homes site is now considered one of significant regional importance after experts Border Archaeology discovered the settlement and burial ground.

Handmade pottery and textile tools were found at the Late Bronze Age to Middle/Late Iron Age small settlement.

The remains of at least 52 people - as well as grave goods such as bead necklaces, pendants, personal objects and weapons - were found at the Anglo-Saxon burial site.

Alongside these findings, 9,310 litres of paleoenvironmental samples were also taken to shed light on the human activity of the past.

First the demolition, soon comes the building, but at the moment the site of Wigan’s Galleries shopping centre is in the hands of archaeologists. More than 25 exploratory trenches have been dug on the large tract of land between Market Place and New Market Street as experts bid to unearth historical treasures.

Such excavations are a standard part of the process in larger developments such as the Galleries25 project.

Chances to seek out buried artefacts and remnants of old roads and buildings are few and far between so they have to be seized upon. And Wigan is ancient enough to have the potential to yield up all kinds of secrets from the past.

The town centre has been there for hundreds of years and played a key part in the English Civil War of the 17th century and Roman remains have also been recovered from sites nearby, leading experts to speculate that this is the empire’s settlement known on maps of the time as Coccium.

But so far the works, which are of course delaying the start of construction of a major new complex incorporating leisure, hospitality, retail and accommodation, have proved rather disappointing.

Cotswold Archaeology have been tasked by the Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency to search the crash site for the remains of the pilot, who died when the B-17 crashed following a system failure in 1944.

At the time, the plane was carrying a payload of 12,000lbs of Torpex, an explosive comprised of 42% RDX, 40% TNT, and 18% powdered aluminium. Torpex was mainly used for the Upkeep, Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs, as well as underwater munitions.

The pilot was declared MIA when the plane exploded into an inferno, however, using modern archaeological techniques, the researchers plan to systematically excavate and sieve the waterlogged crash site to recover plane ID numbers, personal effects, and any surviving human remains.

It is the hope of the excavation team members that they will be able to recover the pilot’s remains and return him to the United States for burial with full military honours.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense whose mission is to recover unaccounted Department of Defense personnel listed as prisoners of war (POW) or missing in action (MIA) from designated past conflicts.

Follow-up on earlier report:

In a remarkable discovery, a couple accidentally unearthed a treasure trove of 17th-century coins while renovating their farm in West Dorset, England.

The find, which occurred nearly five years ago, came as the couple dug deeper to increase the head height in their long-house cottage at South Poorton Farm. Robert Fooks struck a glazed pottery bowl with his pickaxe, revealing about 100 coins dating back to the first English Civil War.

The “Poorton Coin Hoard,” as it became known, included gold coins from James I and Charles I, as well as silver half crowns, shillings, and sixpences from the time of Elizabeth I, Phillip, and Mary. The collection recently sold for approximately $75,000 at Duke’s Auction House.

Archaeologists excavating an early medieval site on the East Yorkshire coast said they have found buildings and objects of "national significance".

The team from the University of York began work uncovering the remains of a timber hall close to Skipsea, and have now found evidence of an even earlier settlement.

Dr Jim Leary, from the University's Department of Archaeology, said only a "handful" of such sites existed in the UK and the discovery of buildings and tools that could date back as far as the 5th or 6th Centuries was "phenomenal".

The team are expected to be on site until the end of May.

A homeowner is searching for answers after an obscure inscription was found written underneath a stone slab in his garden patio.

Builders made the discovery while working on the 300-year-old home of John Adams in Norbury, Shropshire.

Mr Adams shared a photograph on social media to try to work out what the text might say with several people suggesting it was in Hebrew.

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Mr Adams, who works for the National Trust, said his house was located on a road that was once a major travelling route.

"It was an inn previously. It was also a pub," he said. "Maybe it was [written by] somebody who happened to be passing through or staying here."

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Experts at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have been contacted to see if they can translate the stone.