Britain, man your TVs and iPlayers!Great Britain might be a small island but it has a huge history and, every year, hundreds of excavations bring lost treasures up to the surface. Presented by Dr Alice Roberts, ‘Digging For Britain‘ joins these excavations in a new BBC Twohistory series. ‘Digging for Britain’ is produced by 360 Production (a look behind the scenes) and follows ayear of archaeology around the country, revealing and contextualising some of the newest finds, research and social history. Its four episodes focus onfocus on the Roman, Prehistoric, Anglo-Saxon and Tudor eras. Digging the Romans In the first…
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Archaeology students learning to use mapping equipment have discovered a complex of monument buildings outside the Roman fortress at Caerleon, South Wales. The team says it will lead to a complete rethink about how Britain was conquered and occupied by the Roman forces almost 2,000 years ago. The students from the Cardiff Universitys School of History, Archaeology and Religion were learning how to use geophysical equipment in fields outside the Caerleon fortress. Squeezed into the ground between the amphitheatre and the River Usk, the outlines of a series of huge buildings were revealed. The discovery of the settelement’s monumental suburb…
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Thinking of Lucy strolling around the east African landscape in search of food, we can nowpicture her looking for meat with a stone tool in hand. Bones foundin Ethiopia, push back the earliest known stone tool use and meat consumption by almost one million years and provide the first evidence that these behaviours can be attributed to Lucy’s species. Aninternational team of researchers has discovered evidence our ancestors were using stone tools and ate the nutricious meat and marrow of large mammals 1 million years earlier than previously documented. While working in the Afar region of Ethiopia, the Dikika Research…
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Archaeologist working on Stone Age remains at a site in North Yorkshire say it contains Britain’s earliest surviving house. It dates to at least 8,500BC when Britain was part of continental Europe. The team from the Universities of Manchester and York unearthed the 3.5 metres circular structure next to an ancient lake at Star Carr, near Scarborough. The 10,500-year-old house, which was first excavated by the team two years ago, was comparable to an Iron Age roundhouse. It had post holes around a central hollow which would have been filled with organic matter such as reeds, and possibly a fireplace.It…
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PASE Domesday, a database of Domesday Book linked to mapping resources, has been launched online today, ahead of tomorrows Domesday special to be broadcast on BBC Two (preview video ‘The Domesday Inquest’). In the documentary, Dr Stephen Baxter seeks to prove that the Domesday Book could not have been used to collect taxes, arguing that it is about something far more important than money. According to Dr Baxter, its real purpose was to confer revolutionary new powers on the monarchy in Norman England. The Domesday Book The Domesday Book is the product of a great survey of England commissioned by…
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Archaeologists have discovered a 1,800 year old tunnel that leads to a system of galleries 12 meters below Teotihuacan’s Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, in Mexico. Spanning an area of more than 83 square kilometres, Teotihuacan is one of the largest archaeological sites in Mexico and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The city had nearly 250,000 inhabitants when it was at its height in the early 1st millennium AD. It also contains some of the largest pre-Columbian pyramids in the New World. Archaeologists hope that the galleries they detected are actually the tombs of Teotihuacans rulers. “For a…
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This week sees the opening of the Ipswich Museum‘s new Egyptian Gallery. Visitors will be able tomarvel at the mummy of Lady Tahathor, or find out about daily life in ancient Egypt as they journey down the Nile. But wait… there has been a terrible crime! A thief has broken into the museum, and stolen a very rare and precious Egyptian artefact! Can you- or your kids -help solve the mystery? This Saturday, on the 7th of August, the Ipswich Museum celebrates the grand reopening of its Egyptian Gallery. At the centre of the new set-up is the mummy of…
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After nine years of shifting through WWII bombing debris, restoration experts have puzzled back together over 30 Aramaean sculptures and reliefs. Watch the slideshow. When in November 1943 an air raid on Berlin destroyed the Tell Halaf Museum and its contents, it was thought one of Germany’s most important Near Eastern collections was lost forever. A year later more than 27,000 fragments were recovered from the museum’s ruins and taken to the cellars of the Pergamon Museum for storage. Luckily, archaeologists never throw something away. Restoration of the 3000-year-old sculptures and bas-reliefs eventually started in 2001. Now, after almost a…
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In this digital age, largemuseum maps and heavy guide booksbadly needed when visitingthe bigger institutions seem so passe. But how exactlydo you get around then? At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, you can now chart your own course with their AMNH Explorer (video preview) a brand new app that is part custom navigation system and part personal tour guide for the museum’s world-famous halls. The app promises totake youfrom the edge of the universe to the age of the dinosaurs, providing turn-by-turn directions.When you urgentlyneed to find the bathroom, it will even calculate you the quickest…
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Almost 32,000 years ago, man got its first puppy. Today still, humans have a special connection with animals, regardless if they are sitting on our laps, or – point on our plates. Why is it in our nature to accept of all kinds of creatures into our families and homes? What came first, the carbonade that would stay put, or the steadfast companion in the pursuit for game? And what if our first prehistoric attempts at art were no mindless doodling or sacred effigies, but an early publication of ‘Useful Beasts for Dummies’? In a paper describing a new hypothesis…