The sword and shield appear to have been deliberately broken. The scabbard was laid with its decorated surface lowermost. They have passed from the world of the living. And do the mirror and sword together symbolise a deviation from gender norms? Rising above those norms, or deviating from them? Unifying them? Again, our own prejudices about sex an

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One of the most obvious and undeniable signs of interpersonal violence, ancient or modern, is a weapon or projectile lodged in a body. Today we’d look for a bullet tearing through flesh. In the Stone Age, we look for stone arrowheads and spearheads lodged in ancient bones. The earliest examples in Europe come from two sites in Italy, around 13,000

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But the picture is too neat, too reassuring. Because we have those names, we feel that we have a sense of understanding, which the history does not in fact give us. What does ‘Dumnonii’ actually mean? Does it just refer principally to a geographic area? Or an ethnic group? Or simply a political grouping? (And we cannot escape the fact that such pol

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Some of the clues to our past, our ancestry, lie buried deep underground. They may never be discovered. They may already have disintegrated, merging with the soil, dissolving into groundwater, rendered into fragments of molecules, before anyone ever had the chance to catch them. Others have been prised out of the earth, though. The bones of ordinar

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‘Any diseases in particular that you’re going to focus on? Any burning questions?’ I wonder. ‘I just want all the pathogens! All of the pathogens, all of the time!’ Pooja laughs. ‘But seriously, I’m very interested to see how diseases change when agriculture emerges in the Neolithic – when people begin to live in larger, denser communities. And I t

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But there are other potential Neanderthal burials. They’re all contentious – and anthropologists have argued that it’s important to distinguish between mortuary practices – focused solely on the disposal of dead bodies – and funerary rituals – imbued with symbolic meaning. That’s easier said than done, of course. If a burial contains no obvious gra

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In the eighteenth century, Hungarian foot soldiers were recorded as adding a feather to their caps every time they dispatched an enemy. During the seventeenth century – perhaps influenced by images of Native Americans – soldiers from the Scottish Highlands began to decorate their knitted bonnets with ostrich feathers; those fluffy feather bonnets a

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‘We think that it was to produce a container,’ she said. ‘It was a cup.’ This was deeply strange. I wanted to question it, to doubt it. But there was the evidence in front of me, and I couldn’t think of any other explanation for the way this skull had been carved, sculpted. It certainly didn’t seem to be purely functional – it wasn’t just about ext

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The humanist philosopher Harold Blackham wrote about the British fixation on the dead body in a 1966 essay on re-evaluating ritual: In our own culture the ritual disposal of the corpse accentuates the end, the loss, and at the same time attempts to assuage the grief by the company and sympathy of the mourners and the words of comfort publicly decla

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