Ancestors

The Bible is an unreliable witness when it comes to ancient history, having been written by so many authors and revised so much over time. Many scholars believe the stories in the Old Testament to have been written down in the late Iron Age – drawing on earlier oral histories, of course, but with a healthy dose of legend mixed in.

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

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

Among those fragmentary remains, bits of skull are disproportionately represented. And although the skull cups from Gough’s Cave are unusual – they are not unique. There are at least three other sites where crania seem to have been modified for use as cups. Most are from France, dating from very close to the peak of the last Ice Age, but some appea

But against that background picture of health and disease was unequivocal evidence of violent injury around the time of death. Skulls had been smashed in with blunt weapons – probably adzes; legs had been hacked at, fracturing fibulae and tibiae. That focus on the legs suggests the attackers were not only interested in dealing fatal blows to their

And yet, for the Victorian tourists, Gough’s Cave was ticking a lot of boxes. With its walkways, impressive displays (if not all home-grown) of stalactites and stalagmites, and aesthetically pleasing fake pools, it was starting to out-compete the neighbouring show-cave, run by Gough’s cousins – the Cox brothers. The rivalry between the cousins spil

It was clear that Iron Age burial rites varied considerably across Britain. That even seemed to fit quite well with the picture of the political landscape that the Romans give us, both before and after much of Britain becomes subsumed into that huge, literate empire. They tell us that Britain was divided up into territories, a different tribe occup

weird human-beast mash-ups like the Lion Man of Ulm (which may actually be a rearing bear) dating to around 40,000 years ago

Those are the burial rites the archaeologists can detect, but there must have been many others – the ‘disappearing dead’ of the Iron Age escaping detection by being cremated, excarnated or consigned to watery graves.