Site Section: Guide to Archaeology

Guide: Parliamentary-walls and the Northern Enclosures

Ingleton Visit 3/13 (il16)

Between the mid-18th and late-19th centuries the British Parliament passed almost 5,000 local “Inclosure Acts.” Each Act authorised a team of appointed commissioners to survey one specific township or parish, divide its open-field strips, common pastures, and “wastes” into new, privately owned parcels, and lay out straight roads and boundary walls or hedges. The commissioners issued a legal award map and schedule that became the new title deeds.

Wiltshire

Silbury Hill, Wiltshire

Lying across the spine of southern England, Wiltshire offers a textbook cross‑section of chalk downland, greensand vales and clay lowlands. Its long archaeological record – from 10 000‑year‑old spring‑side camps to modern military landscapes – is inseparable from that underlying geology and from the climatic swing that ended the last Ice Age.

Bubeneč Neolithic Farm, Prague

Bubenec excavations - Institute of Archeology of Academy of Sciences

Quite recently, initial excavation evidence from Bubenec, close to Prague was first announced to the public, pending full publication. As part of that media activity, the head archaeologist for the dig, Petra  Maříková  Vlčková explained that the excavation; below the future Canadian Embassy, in Prague’s Bubeneč district, cut through almost two metres of undisturbed deposits – a rarity in Central Europe.

Wellhill, Dunning Early Neolithic Farm – Perthshire

Dunning Perthshire - Satellite view of Wellhill prehistoric settlement

The village of Dunning in Perthshire, Scotland,  has been revealed through excavation as having traces of human activity dating back 10,000 years. This included evidence of what could be the earliest farming activity recorded in Scotland so far, and also remains of hunter-gathering activity dating back to the Mesolithic period.

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.

Black Dike – Coverdale

Black Dike - 1m LiDAR

Black Dike is the diminutive counterpart to the great Tor Dike, rising from its western arm and climbing to the watershed between Great and Little Whernside. Beginning at roughly SD 988 756—where Tor Dike cleaves the limestone scarp—the Black Dike pursues a steep, sinuous course uphill for nearly 0.6 km, finally spilling onto the ridge crest at about 675 m above sea level

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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