Category: Guide

What might Stonehenge Mean? Dartmoor and Carnac add to the Picture

Dartmoor Stone Rows

Stonehenge has always been enigmatic, due to its use of those definitive morticed trilithons, all of which where squared of, more like the structures of the Maltese temples and other stone structures closer to Africa, as opposed to those of the rest of Britain and most of the wider North-west European ritual landscape.

Prehistoric mounds, cairns and boundary earthworks in Coverdale

Cairn atop Little Whernside

A gazetteer of probable prehistoric mounds, cairns and boundary earthworks in Coverdale. It is not complete and is still being researched.

Hillforts: Defence or Ritual? – Part 1

View to Yeavering Bell

Over the last five years Iron-Age specialists have been re-examining what British hillforts were really for. The question is no longer just “fortress or farm?” but whether many of them were built first and foremost as places of gathering, display and ritual.

Guide: Piles of Stones (OS Maps)

Pile of stones below Yoadcastle

On every late-Victorian and early-20th-century OS sheet the surveyors marked any conspicuous heap of stones they could not instantly classify as a tumulus, beacon, trig-point or boundary stone with the catch-all term “Pile of Stones.”

Guide: Ritual/Ceremonial Mounds

Marlborough mound 20240518 looking southwards

These are raised platforms created first and foremost for cult, procession, assembly or conversion—not for fortification or routine boundary-making. They tend to be much more significant and monumental than other mounds and raised platforms. Some are the largest structures known of their type. In Britain, possibly the best known example is Silbury Hill in Wiltshire.

Guide: Spoil Heaps

Ochre mine in the Lion Cavern in Eswatini southern Africa - Credit - Jörg Linstädter

These are artificial hills made from the unwanted rock, shale and tailings that come up with coal, metal ore, stone or clay when it is being mined or quarried. Because extractive industry is both deep and long-lived, single collieries or pits can generate tens of millions of cubic metres of spoil; pushed out by locomotive, conveyor or tippler wagon and dumped in successive layers, the piles quickly become a distinctive landform.

Guide: Hillfort Mounds of Europe

Trelleborg airphoto

Guide: Common Features of Iron Age Hillforts This article attempts to serve as a guide for many of the features of the hillforts found in Britain, in Read more Guide: Iron-Age minting: Ceramic Pellet-mould trays This article explores the most tangible evidence we possess for indigenous minting north of the Humber: the smashed ceramic “pellet-mould” …

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Guide: Barrows

royal kurgans barrow, interior

A barrow is a mound of earth and/or stones raised over a grave or group of graves. Used from the Neolithic through to the Iron Age (roughly 4000 BCE to 500 CE), barrows were often constructed to honour elite individuals, such as tribal leaders, warriors, or chieftains. They are frequently found singly or in cemeteries known as barrow fields.

Guide: SAR Doppler Tomography

a close up of a red and white pattern on a white background

Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) already relies on Doppler shifts: echoes from scatterers in a side-looking radar beam have slightly different frequencies as the platform flies past, and focusing those micro-shifts yields a two-dimensional image.

Guide – Exploring the Past with LIDAR

A scene showing a Roman archaeologist in the field, holding a tablet displaying LIDAR data.

Imagine being able to see the landscape around you in a completely new way—an invisible layer revealing the hidden structures of the past, right beneath the surface.

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