Posts tagged Iron Age
Roman graveyard (almost) found in Copenhagen
Oct 10th
This shows how little I understand the original news story.
There’s surprising news today. Burials of around thirty Romans have been discovered. This would please an archaeologist anywhere, but the oddity is that they’ve been found in a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark. My first reaction is that the translation is wrong, but the original text reads:
Arkæologer på hemmelig missionArkæologerne fra Kroppedal Museum har fundet en gammel romersk gravplads, men afslører ikke stedets geografiske placering, før de er færdige med udgravningerne.
With an online dictionary I get that as roughly:
Archaeologists on a clandestine missionArchaeologists from Kroppedal Museum have found an ancient Roman graveyard, but will not reveal its location before finishing the excavation.
It’s a shame to lose the pussycat, but the finds seem fascinating. (more…)
New Bog Body discovered
Jun 22nd
Thanks in abundance to Keats’ Telescope for pointing out this discovery in the German press which I haven’t seen in the UK yet. My Google-assisted and poor translation of one of the stories follows:
Hand of Nienburg girl. Photo by dpa.The puzzling moorland girl
An alleged murder victim becomes a sensation: A recently discovered moorland corpse is 2,500 years old.
Nienburg/Hannover. A “Teenager” more than 2,500 years old was found near Nienburg in Lower Saxony. The body of the young girl is almost completely preserved. Not for around 40 years as such a spectacular find been recovered in Europe according experts. The body is one of the oldest ever corpses found in north German moors. The researchers expect important new explanations about the way of life of humans approximately 2,500 years ago.
The cause of death is unclear
Still, how the young woman came to death in the moorland is unclear, said the director of the excavations, Alf Metzler, yesterday. Court-medical investigations have shown no use of force. “It is supposed she sank in the moorland and then drowned or suffocated”, said the archaeologist of the National Office for monument protection of Lower Saxony. Why the woman would go at all into the moorland he More >
The Coligny Calendar
May 23rd
Looking for archaeological evidence of the Celtic Calendar is problematic. With up to eight potential targets for significant alignments it can be a matter of faith whether a monument is aligned accurately to a specific sunrise or just facing a general sunrise direction. It has been argued that the Coligny Calendar is independent correlating evidence, but this too may be ambiguous in tracing ancient timekeeping. (more…)
What is an Equinox?
May 9th
In theory an equinox should be easy to define. It’s the point halfway between the solstices. However, in what way do we mean halfway? Halfway in space or halfway in time? Or something completely different? (more…)
Britain BC by Francis Pryor
May 4th
There is a problem in archaeology, which Francis Pryor neatly encapsulates in at the start of his book Britain BC:
Stories have plots and themes, and I have fashioned this book around what I think are the most important. But inevitably I have had to omit an enormous amount of significant material, simply because it fell outside the immediate scope of the story. However Britain BC is not intended to be a textbook, nor is it in any way comprehensive. It’s essentially a narrative – and a personal one at that. (Pryor 2004:xxvi)
It’s a problem referred to by Campbell (1996), idea that popular and scholarly are polar opposites. Ultimately it leads to the belief that if a text is written so as to be inaccessible then by logic it must be highly scholarly. If (by avoiding writing a textbook) Pryor aimed to produce an unscholarly work he has, thankfully, failed spectacularly. (more…)
The ‘Celtic Calendar’ and the Solstices
May 2nd
If you visit www.archaeoastronomy.com between now and May 5 and look at their very cool graphic of the Earth’s orbit, you’ll notice that the festival of Beltane is on its way. Beltane is the origin of what are now the May Day celebrations and part of what is often referred to as the ‘Celtic Calendar’. This is the idea that the year can be divided into eight parts. Between them the solstices and the equinoxes divide the year into four parts and four additional mid-quarter days placed between a solstice and an equinox divide the year into eight. Controversially many people hold that the calendar isn’t merely Celtic, but has roots deep in the Stone Age which can be seen in the alignments of stone rows in the British Isles. The evidence is ambiguous but intriguing. Some of the events as clearly observable and some rely on abstract geometry.
Additionally some people claim that these days are shared by the world. This is absolutely true. So are days like July 14th, but July 14th is really only significant to the French. Were the days of this eight-fold calendar significant across the world? Certainly the easiest event to see is the solstice and More >
