Boudicca’srampaging Celts tore through Calleva Atrebatum, now Silchester, killing thousands of Romans and leaving the town a smouldering wasteland. That’s what 13 years of excavations at the Berkshire town suggest, say a leading expert. Professor Michael Fulford of the University of Reading claims Silchester bears all the scars of the AD60 rebellion, in which up to 80,000 people were massacred by Boudicca and her Britons. An Iron Age settlement was found at Silchester just last year – and though it is often overlooked in the pantheon of Roman British towns Prof. Fulford insists it was at least as important than…
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It’s May Day this Saturday. And while to most of us all it means is an extra day off work, to some it’s one of the year’s biggest dates. A menagerie of anarchists, anticapitalists and fairweather philosophers will descend on London intent on burning down burger bars and breaking the system. But among the madness and the rolling news stories, most of them won’t realise they’ve hijacked an ancient festival going back thousands of years – and they’ve all got it hopelessly wrong. May Day today is the sibling of International Workers’ Day, an anti-establishment bash dating back to the…
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‘Evangelist explorers’ called Noah’s Ark Ministries International, (a name half-Orwell, half Playdays), search for the legendary vessel. Said explorers then ‘discover’ the ark up a Turkish mountain. Naturally not everyone welcomes the news without a hint of skepticism, and the blogosphere’s been buzzing with hoax stories, images, background info and videos – one of which you can see right here. So here’s a snippet of what the web’s been saying about this ‘breakthrough’ – Hot From NIMA The NIMA site itself gives little more than a few newspaper cut-outs (nearly all in Chinese) and an expedition timeline. Quote:March 2010 –…
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I went to see How to Tame Your Dragon at the weekend – a beautiful and delightful film by Dreamworks Animation about Hiccup, a distinctly un-Viking-like young boy from a village of blood-thirsty Vikings. Hiccup discovers that creatures who are different from them are not necessarily the enemy a discovery that his marauding fellow Vikings are unlikely to believe easily. Differentiating foreign from invading is a difficult concept that mankind has long struggled to grasp. But do we really still live in an era where a social message like this is necessary – are we still as socially and politically…
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Plans to close the University of Glasgows Centre for Battlefield Archaeology as part of funding cuts have been met with strong criticism from prestigious quarters since coming to light earlier this month. The centre, part of Guard and the Department of Archaeology, is an arm of the university which offers archaeological services to external organisations. Its biggest claim to fame is its work supporting Channel 4s Time Team programme. The Director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, Dr Tony Pollard, has appeared on some of the Time Team programmes, including excavation of a WWII bunker in Ypres, Belgium, and even…
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For me, the press preview of the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition, which opened in New York today, was a momentous event because I’ve never met Dr. Zahi Hawass before, and I got to look him in the eye and shake his hand and even ask him a question. I’ll come to all that in a minute. The exhibition is impressive. I can’t deny that. There was a moment when I actually stopped dead in my tracks, mouth open (soon to be hustled out of the way by a pushy New York journo). This happened when…
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Dr. Zahi Hawass, the charismatic Secretary General of Eygpt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, and chief bodyguard of Egypt’s ancient treasures, likes to make revelations to the media -and he didn’t disappoint atWednesday’s press preview of the final leg of ‘Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs’, set to open at the Discovery Times Square Exposition onApril 23th. He announced, with a typical flourish of portentousness, that King Tut’s chariot will be arriving in about a month to augment the exhibition, which has already toured 7 cities and attracted 7 million visitors. “It is a masterpiece that has never travelled,”…
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Saint George killed a dragon, saved a princess and became the patron saint of England. Tomorrow he’ll be honoured with no small amount of flag-waving, beer-drinking and, you’d think, a fair few A&E visits. But who’s the man behind the myth, the man Shakespeare’s Henry V evoked so brilliantly at Agincourt? George – good, strong English name, right? Wrong:George was born into Christian nobility in Cappadocia, a lunar landscape in central Turkey best known for its ‘fairy chimneys’, around the middle of the 2nd century AD. In truth George’s early years are about as ephemeral as Emile Heskey’s England career,…
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When he arrived in Britain in 122AD, Emperor Hadrian immediately saw a problem. The Roman Empire was already stretched thinner than a Jim Davidson joke, and spreading out into the monstrous back yard of the Picts and Brigantes, two of the island’s fiercest clans, was a hassle he couldn’t afford. So rather than waste energy fighting, Hadrian set about cordoning off Britannia with an 84 mile-long stone wall, manned by thousands of soldiers with its own towns and forts. But while Hadrian’s Wall ligatured Britannia’s frozen north, the southern capital of Londinium was also at risk of attack. And while…
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As volcanic ash from Iceland’s volcano continues to cause chaos, there is news that access to Iran‘s ancient sites could soon become easier. From June to October this year, IranAir plans to operate a weekly non-stop flight from London Heathrow to Shiraz. The Saturday service will operate alongside the airlines existing three-day-a-week London-Tehran service, and see a return Shiraz-London flight offered every Sunday. Internal flights already operate from Tehran to Isafahan, Mashhad and Tabriz, as well as to Shiraz. The news comes at a time when Iraq is also opening up to tourists. When the ash clears, adventurous travellers will…