Sublime

After the beginning of the raids in the eighth century, foreign loot was sometimes repurposed as jewellery—book mounts from ecclesiastical volumes turned into brooches, English sword fittings similarly remade, coins pierced and hung on necklaces. In Norway there is an Irish or Scottish reliquary, almost certainly plundered from a monastery, that se

Evidence is also mounting that many hunter-gatherer tribes were not as nomadic as had previously been thought. In addition, seeds are readily portable.

There is another great debate about farming: did it spread through imitation, or did it spread because migrant populations of farmers displaced the hunter-gatherers? The answer in Europe seems to be the latter. The provisional evidence suggests that the early agriculturalists from Anatolia arrived as migrants in Western Europe around 6000 BCE and l

It was Sir John Lubbock, one of the founders of the modern British discipline of archaeology, who divided the Stone Age for the first time, into Old and New, in 1865 (the Middle Stone Age did not push in between for another seventy years).

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

If the Tassili-n-Ajjer can claim consideration as the original Eden and westernmost location of partnership culture, then certainly Çatal Hüyük, in central Anatolia, must be seen as its Neolithic and eastern culmination.