Scenes From Prehistoric Life

The entrance to the Robber’s Den Cave was located in a steep cliff, which modern cavers have to climb using ropes. This cliff was at the boundary of the fertile plain with all the Bronze Age settlement remains and the sparse limestone plateau above it – where the tombs occur. So it could be seen as a way into another realm. Entering the cave was no

The sheer number of barrows surrounding Stonehenge can best be appreciated by walking through the landscape on a spring or autumn day, when the air is clear and dry and before the crops become too high. Most of the hundreds of tourists will be trudging around Stonehenge and you can see them, and of course get some superb views of the Stones, from t

I had always supposed that the first wheeled vehicles would have been rather crude, probably used for carting hay or straw on farms, and with big wheels and heavy superstructure. But the trouble is, there’s no archaeological evidence for such vehicles. When hay or straw needed to be moved, it was more likely to be carried to stacks by people with f

when we were excavating Bronze and Iron Age settlements at Fengate, we frequently came across hand-dug wells. In most cases they were 2 or 3 metres (6–10 ft) deep and their sides were often reinforced against collapse by a woven lining of willow or hazel wattle-work. The ground they were dug through usually consisted of quite loose sand and gravel.

nearly all the fields were entered by way of corner entranceways. Anyone who has ever tried to drive a herd of cattle or a flock of sheep from one field to another will know that the gates have to be at the corners. Put them in the middle of a long side and the animals won’t go through them: they’ll often bunch up, panic and seem to go a bit mad. B

The first coins were minted in Britain several decades before the Claudian invasion. I strongly suspect that many educated Britons in the south would have spoken Latin fluently and would have visited the mainland of Europe frequently. There would probably have been daily ferry crossings of the English Channel.

There is some evidence that people had been extracting salt from Hallstatt in a small way since Neolithic times, but after 1200 BC the pace started to quicken; from 800 BC until about 500 BC, the mines were a major enterprise. Salt doesn’t just pickle onions and bacon. It also preserves anything in close contact with it, like the superb pieces of f

Maes Howe belongs to a tradition of tombs known as passage graves, which probably originated in Brittany. It was built in the later Neolithic, shortly after 3000 BC, and consists of a long entrance passage that leads into a central hall with small side cells for burials. In common with the other great passage grave from these islands, Newgrange, in

The sheer abundance of struck (i.e. worked) Mesolithic flints found at Blick Mead is remarkable and suggests that this was not a briefly occupied, one-off settlement. By 2018, the excavation had revealed a total of 30,608 Mesolithic flints.8 People returned repeatedly to Blick Mead for some four millennia and they must have been aware that groups o