John Coles and his Somerset Levels Project team pioneered most of the specialized techniques you need to employ when excavating something as soft as waterlogged wood. Steel trowels – the normal hand tool of all archaeologists – can do terrible damage to an ancient timber. The chemical composition of the wood itself is altered by centuries of

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Another, if anything even more extraordinary, prehistoric working area was revealed in the second quarry. This proved to be the site of the butchering of a wild horse, but most remarkably, the bone and flint debris that was so painstakingly excavated over many weeks seems to have been dropped there over just one day, half a million years ago. We

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