Consultation on proposed UK World Heritage sites
A consultation on the UK sites to be nominated to UNESCO for World Heritage Site status over the next five to ten years was launched by Culture Secretary Chris Smith. Out of some 120 sites considered, 32 examples in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies have been selected, that would be likely to meet UNESCO's stringent criteria.
Among the recommended sites there are some prehistoric/megalithic sites and areas which include: The Lake District, Cumbria, England; the Boxgrove, Sussex, England; La Cotte de Saint Brelade, Jersey; the Mousa Broch, Shetlands, Scotland.
Source: DCMS press release
3,000-year-old boat is being brought back home (Dover - England)
After a programme of painstaking recovery and conservation, a 3,000-year-old boat is being brought back from Portsmouth ready for reassembly on a specially- created cradle in a new gallery between Dover Museum and the White Cliffs Experience.
Since the boat was discovered in a deep water-logged pit during construction of a pedestrian subway under the A20, a programme of painstaking recovery, conservation and display preparation has been carried out, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the English Heritage, the Wolfson Foundation and many other donations from organisations and individuals.
It will take up to six months to reassemble the 3,000-year-old boat, which was discovered in 1992 by archaeologists working alongside contractors building the new A20 between Dover and Folkestone.
During much of that time visitors to the museum and the White Cliffs Experience will be able to watch the step-by-step rebuilding of the 32 pieces of the boat by experts from the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, Mary Rose Trust and English Heritage. "This presents a unique opportunity to witness the reassembly of what is believed to have been Britain's first cross-Channel ferry", said Dover Museum Curator, Christine Waterman.
Source: The Dover Bronze Age Boat Trust press release
The oldest tomb in Western Europe (Carrowmore - Ireland)
Swedish archaeologists have identified the oldest tomb in Western Europe. The discovery at Carrowmore, Co. Sligo in Ireland, is being met with a mixture of excitement and scepticism by prehistorians.
Carbon dating tests carried out on samples from the site suggest that Stong Age hunter-gatherers were building small, roofed stone tombs surrounded by stone circles 7,400 years ago. This is at least 700 years earlier than Bougon: a Neolithic tomb in France that had previously been thought the earlist free-standing stone architecture in Western Europe.
The excavation and other archaeological work at Carrowmore, directed by Goran Burenhult of the University of Stockholm, is particularly exciting because the tomb and stone circles would have to have been built by early Irish populations hundreds of years before agriculture reached mainland Britain or Ireland.
Archaeologists refer to this pre-agricultural (pre-Neolithic) era as the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) and no free-standing stone arcitecture from that period has ever been discovered in Western Europe.
Source: The Independent
Broch discovered at the Scatness dig (Shetland - Scotland)
Archaeologists working on the Scatness excavation at the southern tip of Shetland mainland have identified the remains of an Iron Age fortress nearby. Artefacts thought to date from at least 3700 BC, including a stone grinder and early pottery, have been found at the same site.
Sources: The Scotsman, The Herald (Glasgow)
Two Irish henges larger than Stonehenge (Limerick - Ireland)
Irish archaeologists have identified two prehistoric henge enclosures larger than Stonehenge and possibly as old. They also believe that site, just south of Limerick City, may be the lost location of Tara Luachra, a place famed in early Irish epic literature.
The henges (defined as such by having a ditch inside an outer bank, like Avebury and the first period of Stonehenge) lie on Friarstown Hill, known locally as Tara Hill.
The enclosures of Friarstown were first detected on aerial photographs more than 30 years ago. They were thought at the time to be hill forts, but according to Eamon P. Kelly and Tom Condit both "have a large substantial outer bank and arethus more likely to belong to the henge or ceremonial enclosure group of monuments"
The smaller enclosure, on the limestone summit, is 140 by 120 metres, slightly larger than Stonehenge, with banks on both sides of the ditch. The larger henge, some 40 metres to the east on a secondary summit, is 165 by 157 metres, exceeding in size even the great circle at Stanton Drew in England.
The proximity of the two Limerick enclosures to each other suggests a ritual rather than defensive function. While a Neolithic date of around 2500 BC is possible by comparison with English henges, there are other, later enclosures on Tara Hill, most likely to be early Christian or medieval date.
There is the possibility that the hill may be the elusive site of Tara Luachra, "Tara of the Rushes", named in the epic poem Mesca Uladh, "The Intoxication of the Ulstermen".
Only further prospection and excavation are likely to yield afirm answer, although the recent discovery of a defensive ditch at the more famous Tara near Dublin is an indication that ritual sites may well have been involved in the internecine warfare celebrated by the Irish annals.
Sources: The Times, Archaeology Ireland
Excavations at Cranit (Orkney - Scotland)
In April this year a tractor broke through the roof of a stone built chamber under a field at Crantit Farm in Orkney, uncovering an apparently undisturbed Neolithic tomb. The excavation of this amazing site is being undertaken by Glasgow University for Historic Scotland and is possible to follow on the Internet the dig as it progresses.
Archaeologists working at the Crantit burial chamber have already found well preserved cremated bones in a sealed stone coffin thought to date back 4,000 years. However, one of the most exciting discoveries has been a 'light box' designed by the makers of the monument to 'wake' their ancestors at the time of the winter solstice. This is the first such device found in Britain, though a similar feature was found at Newgrange in Ireland.
Sources: The Scotsman, The Herald (Glasgow)
A tunnel for Stonehenge
The setting and presentation of Stonehenge will probably improve with a series of improvements to the A303 trunk road as part of the English Government's Roads Review. Every day 21,000 cars currently pass within 300 yards of the stones and traffic flows are expected to double by the year 2017.
The decision to proceed with the scheme follows a joint DETR/DCMS/English Heritage study and a negotiated agreement between the two Departments. At least a third of the costs (GBP50 million) will be funded from heritage sources.
The A303 alongside the stones will be upgraded to a dual carriageway and hidden from the monument in a 2 km cut-and-cover tunnel. Cut and cover will unfortunately destroy a strip of National Trust land, but offers the opportunity for a full archaeological survey and excavations, furthering our knowledge of the landscape around Stonehenge. This will open up the possibility of closure of part of the A344 which intrudes severely on the World Heritage Site. It will also allow for the replacement and relocation of the current visitor facilities, condemned by the Public Accounts Committee in 1993 as a "national disgrace".
Culture Secretary Chris Smith said: "The three quarters of a million people who visit Stonehenge each year are confronted by an unedifying scene: shabby visitor facilities, an ugly underpass and the roar of traffic on the roads which blight the historic landscape and threaten the stones themselves. The new road scheme at last unlocks the impasse that has met all previous attempts to improve this sorry state of affairs".
Subject to the planning process and after a full archaeological survey, construction work could begin in 5-7 years.
Sources: English Heritage, DCMS press releases
The oldest astronomical megalith alignment (Nabta - Egypt)
An assembly of huge stone slabs found in Egypt's Sahara Desert that date from about 6,500 years to 6,000 years ago has been confirmed by scientists to be the oldest known astronomical alignment of megaliths in the world.
Known as Nabta, the site consists of a stone circle, a series of flat, tomb-like stone structures and five lines of standing and toppled megaliths. Located west of the Nile River in southern Egypt, Nabta predates Stonehenge and similar prehistoric sites around the world by about 1,000 years, said University of Colorado at Boulder astronomy Professor J. McKim Malville.
A lot of effort went into the construction of a purely symbolic and ceremonial site. The stone slabs, some of which are nine feet high, were dragged to the site from a mile or more distant. The ruins lie on the shoreline of an ancient lake that began filling with water about 11,000 years ago when the African summer monsoon shifted north.
Five megalithic alignments at Nabta radiate outward from a central collection of megalithic structures. Beneath one structure was a sculptured rock resembling a cow standing upright. No human remains have yet been found at Nabta. The 12-foot-in-diameter stone circle contains four sets of upright slabs. Two sets were aligned in a north-south direction while the second pair of slabs provides a line of sight toward the summer solstice horizon. Because of Nabta's proximity to the Tropic of Cancer, the noon sun is at its zenith about three weeks before and three weeks after the summer solstice, preventing upright objects from casting shadows. These vertical sighting stones in the circle corresp ond to the zenith sun during the summer solstice said Malville, an archeoastronomer. For many cultures in the tropics, the zenith sun has been a major event for millennia
An east-west alignment also is present between one megalithic structure and two stone megaliths about a mile distant. There also are two other geometric lines involving about a dozen additional stone monuments that lead both northeast and southeast from the same megalith. We still don't understand the significance of these lines Malville said. During summer and fall, the individual stone monoliths would have been partially submerged in the lake and may have been ritual markers for the onset of the rainy season.Although some believe the high culture of subsequent Egyptian dynasties was borrowed from Mesopotamia and Syria, Malville and others believe the complex and symbolic Nabta culture may have stimulated the growth of the society that eventually constructed the first pyramids along the Nile about 4,500 years ago.
The Nabta culture may have been a trigger for the development of social complexity in Egypt that later led to the Pharaonic dynasty he said. The Nabta project was funded primarily by the National Science.
Source: University of Colorado at Boulder Office of Public Relations
3,300-year-old Log-Boat recovered (Shardlow - England)
Archaeologists have recovered a log-boat, probably dating from the middle Bronze Age (circa 1300 BC), still carrying some of its cargo of quarried stone. The ten metre long oak boat was exposed at Shardlow quarry, near Derby by recent floods on the nearby River Trent.
At first quarry workmen thought the boat, lying on its side in a three metre deep gully, was the trunk of an oak tree but further flooding washed away the surrounding silt to expose the find. This was confirmed as a boat by local archaeologist.
Five large blocks (up to a metre across) of Bromsgrove sand stone were found in the boat, with others spilled alongside. They were believed to have been quarried from a sandstone outcrop situated two kilometres up river. Originally the bow and the stern were missing but the bow has now been located.
Its location, buried in the bed of a former side channel of the River Trent, suggests three possible scenarios:
@. It was being used for taking stones from the outcrop up river to strengthen a stone and timber platform built across the side channel. Some 250-300 oak posts have been found driven into the bed of the channel as evidence of this platform or causeway
a. It was transporting stone robbed from the platform for building elsewhere
b. The boat was deliberately rammed full of large blocks of stone in order to sink it as a gift to the gods
The boat will be cut into sections and moved to the quarry yard. Decisions on its final resting place have yet to be made.
Sources: ARC press release, Nottingham Evening Post
Bronze-Age shield discovered in Salisbury (Cadbury Castle - England)
The 3,000-year-old bronze shield was found last summer on a secret site near the great hill fort of Cadbury Castle, which some believe was the site of Camelot.
Only 40 Bronze Age bronze shields have been found in Europe, half of them in Britain, but they were all found by chance, usually by peat cutters in bogs. This is the first time archaeologists have been able to study a shield in its original context.
As Stuart Needham, a Bronze Age expert, recalls the discovery: "We saw some flakes of green in the soil, and then about an eight inch strip of the rim emerging. We guessed what it might be, but we could hardly believe it."
A single post-hole was found, directly below the shield. Tabor believes the shield belonged to a powerful chieftain, and was hung on the post after his death. "The shield would have been an impressive object, hung where it would be seen by anyone approaching the site, and where it would be lit by the last westerly rays of the setting sun."
It was a luxury object made for show, not fighting: working shields were wood and leather. Tests with replicas in the 1960s established that one sword slash would cut right through the thin metal.
Source: The Guardian
1998 International Rock-Art Congress
Universidade de Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro Vila Real (Portugal) - 6 - 12 September 1998
UTAD (Universidade de Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro) is the venue of the 1998 International Rock-Art Congress (IRAC 1998) which takes place in Vila Real, a charming town in the north of Portugal, from 6-12 September 1998.
The theme, Crossing Frontiers, will bring together researchers and students that are interested in the study, conservation, and presentation of rock-art throughout the world. The aim is to reveal and explore the latest discoveries, emerging methods and techniques so that participants can be fully up-to-date with the most recent developments.
Further Information: Mila Simoes de Abreu, IRAC 1998 (Congresso Internacional de Arte Rupestre) Seccao de Geologia - Unidade de Arqueologia Universidade de Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro Apartado 202 5001 Vila Real Codex Portugal Tel: +351 (59) 320179 Fax: +351 (59) 326146
Source: UTAD press release
Neolithic Orkney in its European Context
Orkney Heritage Society, Kirkwall, Orkney (Scotland) - 10 - 14 September 1998
Orkney remains one of the most exciting and important places in Europe for studying the Neolithic past in terms of site survival, site density and finds.
This conference presents an opportunity to bring together a variety of opinions and views about Orkney in the light of new theories and new discoveries. Speakers from Britain and Europe will be placing Neolithic Orkney in a wider European context.
The Conference takes place over four days and includes opportunities for participants to take part in guided study tours in the Mainland of Orkney or to the Northern Isles. In addition there will be public demonstrations of Neolithic Skills. The cost of the conference is 85 pounds sterling, 45 pounds unwaged. This includes four days, excluding accommodation, the study trips or the conference dinner.
If you would like further information contact the Conference Secretary by the snail-mail and phone: Katherine Towsey, c/o Tankerness House Museum, Broad Street, Kirkwall, Orkney KW15 1DH. Tel: (01856) 873191 or 870964
Source: Orkney Heritage Society press release
Stone axes and the study of Neolithic Britain
Bristol dayschool (England) - 24 October 1998
On 24 October 1998 a dayschool celebrating the work of the Implement Petrology Committee of the South-West Federation of Museums and Art Galleries will be held in the Department of Physics of the University of Bristol.
Six leading archaeologists in the field from England, Scotland and Ireland will give papers presenting the important recent developments in our understanding of the manufacture, exchange and meaning of Neolithic stone tools.
All are most welcome to attend. For bookings contact Debbie Blackman, Centre for the Historic Environment, 8-10 Berkeley Square, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1HH, Tel: (0117) 9287128.
Source: Council for British Archaeology via Britarch
