British Archaeology

A large open space in in Trelai Park that had been used as a playing field since 1933 yielded a treasure trove of prehistoric artifacts during a 2022 land survey conducted by a local school that was building a sports field in a corner of the park. Upon the archaeological site’s discovery, the Caerau and Ely Rediscovering Heritage Project (CAER), an organization promoting community involvement in archaeological research, began collaborations with Cardiff University to excavate the area.

Archaeologists initially expected the discovery would shed new light on everyday life in the region between the late Iron Age and early Roman Era. To their surprise, unearthed shards from a clay pot dated the site to the Bronze Age, around 1500 B.C.E.

The excavation was soon found to constitute two Bronze Age roundhouses—circular dwellings, typically featuring thatched roofs, that were made up of walls built using wooden or stone posts and stuffed with wattle-and-daub, a mixture of twigs, earth, and clay. The roundhouses have been dubbed the oldest houses in Cardiff.

Metal detectors beeped across a quiet, five-acre plot of forest and field on England's eastern Suffolk coast as dozens of American and British service members sifted clumpy, wet soil from a deep impact crater. The tiniest of remains of U.S. Air Force pilot Lt. John Fisher might be here. Exactly 80 years ago Sunday - August 4, 1944 - his B-17 bomber crashed while on a secret mission targeting Nazi rocket sites in Europe during World War II.

"It can make you feel emotional, you know? They've found some personal artifacts that are very endearing," said Garret Browning, a U.S. air repair specialist from Colorado with the U.S. 100th Maintenance Squadron, currently stationed in England.

Experienced in crash damage recovery, Browning is one of about 150 American and British active duty and retired military volunteers looking for a fallen fellow soldier. At 26 years old, Browning is already older than the pilot he was looking for.

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Lt. John W. Fisher Jr., from New York, was just 21 years old when he was killed during Operation Aphrodite, the codename for flying planes on one-way missions to destroy Nazi rocket sites and submarine pens in Europe. Those planes were old, war-weary B-17 "Flying Fortress" bombers, first stripped down for more space, then loaded up with tons of explosives. But Fisher's plane stalled soon after takeoff. He pushed his co-pilot out and sacrificed himself. The plane nosedived into the ground just before the English Channel with France on the horizon.

"This aircraft, it blew apart pretty much in every direction," said Browning. "So something as small as just a bolt or a thread just kind of tells a story."

The remnants these volunteers have found include shattered bits of glass from an oxygen bottle - which might suggest Fisher's remains are nearby. The biggest and heaviest piece of debris was the central part of a propeller with much of its blades sheared off. Other pieces were fragments of the fuselage, engine and even some fabric from a parachute.

Volunteers also found a rusted horseshoe, believed to have been taken on board Fisher's B-17 for luck, and a twisted, fire-darkened nameplate reminding excavators of the origin of the plane from across the Atlantic Ocean: Detroit, General Motors Corporation.

A previously unknown Roman fort discovered in Pembrokeshire in Wales overturns assumptions that the area’s indigenous Celtic tribe was on peaceful terms with the Roman invaders.

The site, which has excited archaeologists, had been hidden until now beneath an enormous, overgrown field. It explains why the land had been unsuccessful for farming: the farmer kept hitting stone.

The discovery was made by Dr Mark Merrony, a leading Roman specialist and tutor at Oxford University, who said: “It is a humongous fort, an incredible find of national importance.”

He is all the more excited because it is right next to a Roman road that he has also identified for the first time.

The fort is thought to date from the first to the third centuries, when the Celtic Demetae tribe inhabited the south-west area of modern Wales.

They were thought to have been pro-Roman, meaning there was less need for a major military presence to quell local resistance.

Merrony said that this fort suggested this part of Wales was considerably more militarised than previously thought: “I now don’t think they were pro-Roman at all, but that the Romans were hitting the area with an iron fist.”

He noted that its form and scale was like the only other Roman fort known in Pembrokeshire, excavated at Wiston near Haverfordwest in 2013. Both forts were now linked to a Roman road network that had not previously been known, he said.

The recent discovery of more than 600 red ochre fragments at a 6,500-year-old ceremonial site near Carlisle, northwestern England, supports an ancient Greek explorer’s account from the 4th century BC in which Britons are referred to as “the painted people.”

Pytheas of Massalia, an explorer from the Greek colony that is modern-day Marseille in southern France, was quoted by later geographers to have spoken of Great Britain as Prettanike, a term derived from the Celtic word Pretani, meaning “the [land of the] painted ones” or “the tattooed folk.”

Julius Caesar, writing in the mid-1st century BC, also mentioned that the inhabitants of Britain had a tradition of painting themselves.

The Carlisle red ochre discovery—the largest find of red ochre pieces found yet in the UK—not only complements the linguistic evidence on ancient Britons’ tradition of body painting but also suggests a long-held gathering or festival which featured body painting rituals, according to The Indepenent.

A number of stones that would have been used to grind ochre deposits into powder were also found along hundreds of thousands of fragments of flint.

Additional findings support the idea that the people that gathered at the Stone Age site in Carlisle, most probably during the salmon-fishing season in spring, originated from across Britain.

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Pytheas of Massalia was the first-ever Mediterranean to reach and explore Great Britain and the Arctic Circle.

He is believed to have traveled as far as Iceland, becoming the first person on record to describe the midnight sun and the first known scientific visitor to see and describe the Celtic and Germanic tribes.

For the past few weeks, the site of redevelopment work at 32 Stodman Street has been host to an archaeological dig by a specialist team from Contour Archaeology Ltd to ensure nothing is missed before building work commences.

The team have explored the history of the town dating back to the medieval period, to develop an understanding of the historical events that occurred on the site, and its place within the history of the town.

Archaeology work has identified Medieval features including walls, wells, enclosure boundaries and pits, one of which contained the fully intact horse burial.

Other finds across the site include roof tiles, pottery, metalwork, and animal bones, such as boar’s tusks as well as cow and sheep bones, which indicate the type of diet medieval people of Newark would have eaten.

Other smaller items are thought to date back as far as the Anglo-Saxon period — with further investigation into this period set to take place.

Archaeologists are finding out more about prehistoric life in Kent from 5,000 years ago at one of the country’s largest ancient burial grounds.

Experts say the multi-year dig at Stringmans Farm on the Lees Court Estate, near Faversham, has uncovered artefacts dating back to the Neolithic or Bronze Age period.

The community excavation project led by a team from the Kent Archaeological Society unearthed a selection of items including flint chippings (leftovers from making stone tools), fragments of rare, decorated pottery created 3,000 years before the Romans came to Kent, and evidence of human prehistoric cremations.

Wigan Archaeological Society members have been unearthing ancient treasures and revealing a previously unknown monument thought to date back to 1650 BC on open land at Aspull.

The enigmatic site first came to their attention in 2019, when a near-circular cropmark was spotted in overhead images seen online.

At first it was thought it might represent the remains of a barrow (burial mound) but investigations were hampered for a long time by the pandemic.

The site – which the archaeologists first called Aspull Ring Feature – lies within sight of Winter Hill and Anglezarke Moor, areas rich in prehistoric monuments and it was thought they might be connected.

There then followed the digging of a series of exploratory trenches, the first of which concluded that the area had been a ditch was deliberately filled in so they changed its name to Aspull Ring Ditch.

Further trenches established the shape of the ditch and uncovered a carefully built structure of alternating layers of sand, rounded stones, and clay. Helpfully, at least two long pieces of burnt wood were also involved in its make-up, allowing experts to take samples for radiocarbon dating which gave them a date from the middle Bronze Age: 1650 BC.

By the close of the 2022 season, they had working theory that the feature had originated as a Neolithic henge monument, which was then repurposed during the Bronze Age, possibly as a funerary enclosure (mortuary).

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A spokesperson for the society said: “While there are still many puzzles and conundrums to unravel at this site, there are two finds that so far defy explanation.

"The first is an irregular stone ball covered with brown and white patinas that hinder identification of the rock type, but it might be granitic, and is certainly not local.

“Our second enigma is a stone inscribed with three deep, parallel grooves, 9mm apart. Then another one turned up, this time with four parallel grooves spaced 8.4mm apart. Better still, it was found in a carefully excavated section, meaning that we can tell it was definitely beneath the burnt layer dated to 1820 BC. Like buses, a third example duly appeared, again in a certain prehistoric context and this time with eight grooves 10mm apart.

“In each case, the grooves are precise and deep, unlike, for example, sharpening stones, where the grooves tend to be at random angles and anything but precise. What they mean, though, is truly mystifying.

Archaeologists have given Britain’s oldest chalk figure a facelift, with work to restore the head and neck profile of the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire.

Archaeological work last year, including examination of previous surveys, showed that parts of the ancient chalk horse carved into the hillside have narrowed over time, as grass has encroached and topsoil slipped.

The head and neck area of the 3,000-year-old figure had narrowed to less than half its typical width.

Now archaeologists from the National Trust and Oxford Archaeology have returned the 364ft (111m) long horse, which dates from the Bronze Age, to its typical profile, by carefully cutting the encroaching turf back to the estimated original edge and re-distributing some of the top layer of chalk on the figure.

During the work, soil samples from the lowest layers of the figure have also been taken to see if they can be used to accurately date its creation.

Previous samples taken in the 1990s revealed the horse to be Britain’s oldest chalk figure, but techniques to date archaeological remains have improved so there is an opportunity to refine the date further, the team said.

In their study, published in the journal Science Advances, the group studied three types of archaeological evidence collected from multiple sites across the U.K. to measure economic growth.

Over the past several decades, the U.K. has enacted laws requiring archaeological investigations on land under development. These studies have led to a large number of archaeological finds. For this new study, the researchers used data from such finds to measure the economic impact of Roman conquest and occupation over hundreds of years approximately 2,000 years ago.

To gain insight into how Roman rule may have impacted Britain, the research team looked at three types of artifacts: buildings, coins and pottery. More specifically, they looked at how such artifacts changed in the years after the Roman conquest. Houses got bigger, they noted, and as people grew richer, they became more careless with their coins, resulting in more of them being lost between floorboard cracks.

As living standards improved, so did the quality and diversity of pottery used for preparing and eating meals. In making such comparisons, the research team was able to watch how economic growth impacted the people who had been conquered.

They found that in many cases, it had been what they describe as intensive—it greatly exceeded the type of growth that would have been expected for the region if the Romans had not arrived with their advanced technology and rules of business conduct.

In their study, published in the journal Science Advances, the group studied three types of archaeological evidence collected from multiple sites across the U.K. to measure economic growth.

Over the past several decades, the U.K. has enacted laws requiring archaeological investigations on land under development. These studies have led to a large number of archaeological finds. For this new study, the researchers used data from such finds to measure the economic impact of Roman conquest and occupation over hundreds of years approximately 2,000 years ago.

To gain insight into how Roman rule may have impacted Britain, the research team looked at three types of artifacts: buildings, coins and pottery. More specifically, they looked at how such artifacts changed in the years after the Roman conquest. Houses got bigger, they noted, and as people grew richer, they became more careless with their coins, resulting in more of them being lost between floorboard cracks.

As living standards improved, so did the quality and diversity of pottery used for preparing and eating meals. In making such comparisons, the research team was able to watch how economic growth impacted the people who had been conquered.

They found that in many cases, it had been what they describe as intensive—it greatly exceeded the type of growth that would have been expected for the region if the Romans had not arrived with their advanced technology and rules of business conduct.

Volunteers are set to take part in a 12-day archaeological dig in the hope of finding signs of medieval life on a farm.

The excavation at High Tarns Farm in Silloth will begin on 22 July.

It will be led by archaeologist Mark Graham and follows his discovery of crop marks on the land, which suggest it was once the site of a large medieval building.

Mr Graham said he was "excited" but warned it could be a let down, adding: "If you're going to be an archaeologist, you better get used to disappointment."

Due to written records, archaeologists have long known that part of the town was once the site of a medieval farm linked to Cistercian monks.

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The marks looked like a "footprint of a large timber building", he said, adding: "I nearly fell off my chair."

He suspected the building was timber as the marks corresponded with holes required for large wooden posts to hold up such a structure.

No such building is detailed in maps going back to the 1800s, he added, and the marks suggest the building is about 50m (164ft) long and 20m (66ft) wide.

Mr Graham's two main theories about the potential building are that it was once a barn belonging to the Cistercian farm, or it is even older and was the home of a Viking chieftain.

"There have been houses on the scale that we're talking about excavated in Scandinavia but to find such a thing here in Cumbria would be absolutely remarkable," he said.

In an extract from her new book, A Mudlarking Year: Finding Treasure in Every Season, Lara Maiklem describes the thrill of discovering a 16th century sword on a Bankside beach.

Thursday 2 February 2022

I hear from the Museum of London today about the 'sixteenth-century bladed object' I found last year. My Excalibur moment happened at the beginning of December on a murky Saturday afternoon. I don't usually mudlark on the weekend — the foreshore is often busier and I try to keep weekends for family time — but I was in London meeting friends for lunch that day, and as I made my way back to the station, I saw the tide was low. Actually, I knew the tide was low, which is why I took the longer route along the river to the station. How could I not? I only briefly considered my new brogues, which were entirely unsuitable, before unlatching the metal gate and taking the concrete stairs down onto the foreshore at Bankside. The light was fading, and I knew I didn't have long before I lost it altogether, so I headed straight for my favourite patch. People were already there, and I could see from the footprints that it had been well searched, so I walked a little further along and that's when I saw it.

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The handle and hilt loomed out at me from a small area of gritty sand that thinly covered the mud into which the blade disappeared. What caught my eye was its regular shape and the two lines of twisted gold wire embedded in the dark brown material of the handle. The blade was only just beneath the surface, and I gently cleared away the sand until I felt the end of it with my fingers. Easing my hand carefully underneath, I lifted it free quite easily, leaving a perfect impression of where it had lain for the best part of 500 years in the dark grey mud. I held the sword aloft. Excalibur of the Thames! And looked around, but everyone had gone and there was nobody to share the moment with. The handle looked to be made of wood with a square pommel carved into the end, finished off by a four-petalled flower or quatrefoil in what I assumed was copper alloy. The blade was broken at about eight inches long and was encrusted in a thick layer of mud, pebbles and rust. When iron rusts, it often engulfs whatever is lying next to it in the mud and ends up looking like a giant caddisfly larva case. If it had been a Victorian padlock or an old horseshoe, I would have been tempted to knock the concretion off with a stone, but this was too precious.

Human bones dated to be more than 1,000 years old have been discovered in the garden of a hotel, with 24 skeletons found alongside bones belonging to a number of others.

The Anglo-Saxon remains of men, women and children were found in the grounds of The Old Bell Hotel in Malmesbury, which is next door to Malmesbury Abbey, in Wiltshire.

The remains are from 670 to 940 AD, so include the very earliest days of the abbey, when it was a monastery.

Malmesbury Abbey historian Tony McAleavy said the results are significant, especially because the place "at this time was one of the leading centres of scholarship in western Europe".

Malmesbury Abbey historian and local resident Tony McAleavy said he "was off the scale excited".

"What we've got here is not a collection of the bodies of monks - it's men, women and children," he added.

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Mr McAleavy added: "It looks like we've found traces of the community of people to helped the monks here.

"It's going to shed new light on the way Malmesbury Abbey worked in its golden age."

The University of York’s Department of Archaeology has uncovered a large timber hall in Skipsea, dating to the early medieval period, among other finds of ‘national significance’.

Measuring 6m wide and 16m long, the hall is a rare find, thought to predate the nearby Norman castle. Around the time the hall was constructed, the area is known to have been in the hands of Harold Godwinson, and later the Lords of Holderness. Its considerable size, marked out by post-holes, suggests a wealthy owner: the building was perhaps used to host celebrations and feasts, or may have welcomed visiting dignitaries.

Other structures found on the site are earlier and smaller, and Dr Jim Leary, from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, believes that they can be linked to early medieval craft-working. Among the associated finds were metalworking debris and whetstones, as well as a spindle whorl, which would indicate that textile-manufacturing was happening in the area. A partly worked jet or jet-like pendant is also evidence of early industry taking place on the site. ‘We’ll need to get the post-excavation analysis under way, and especially 14C dating, to really untangle what is associated with what,’ Dr Leary said.

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However, the archaeology being uncovered at Skipsea is not limited to the medieval period: prehistoric objects were discovered by a water channel, including two ceramic bowls and a large quantity of deer and cattle bones, which illustrates the long archaeological chronology of Skipsea’s landscape. The early history of the site was first noted by Dr Leary and Dr Elaine Jamieson, when they discovered that what was originally thought to be the motte of the Norman castle was, in fact, a reused Iron Age mound (see CA 337).

ARCHAEOLOGISTS from Dorset have discovered human remains and artefacts which give new insight into how early Britons adapted to life after the Roman invasion.

Amongst the grave goods excavated from the 2000-year-old burial pits and graves were Roman-style wine cups and flagons, which suggest that Mediterranean alcohol had become popular addition to British life around the time of the Roman conquest in AD 43.

Students and staff from Bournemouth University (BU) have been excavating Iron Age settlements at the site at Winterborne Kingston for more than fifteen years.

Whilst they have previously discovered human remains and artefacts from before the Romans arrived, these are the first finds that can tell the story of people who lived through the invasion of Dorset.

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Three graves in particular indicated the extent to which the local Durotriges tribe partially integrated into certain Roman ways of life.

The first contained the bodies of two women, aged in their thirties who had been buried together.

The student archaeologists found a roman-style wine flagon and goblets alongside the remains.

“The women were buried in the traditional Iron Age way – on their side in a foetal position. So, although the grave was dug ten to twenty years after the Romans arrived, in the mid to late first century AD, it’s clear that the local people are not becoming Roman in a big way, merely taking things from the Romans that enhance and improve their life, in this instance wine.", Dr Russell explained.

Magna, also known as Carvoran, is a Roman fort situated at the edge of the Whin Sill in Northumberland, England. The fort predates the construction of Hadrian’s Wall, strategically located on the Stanegate frontier to protect the junction of the Maiden Way with the Stanegate.

The fort was garrisoned between AD 85 and AD 122, which included the First Cohort of Syrian Archers, the Second Cohort of Dalmatians, the First Cohort of Batavians, and legionaries from the Second Augusta and the Twentieth Valeria Victrix.

Magna is under the care of the Vindolanda Trust and operates yearly outreach excavations open to the public. In the 2024 season, volunteer archaeologists have unearthed several major findings, including squamae scales, a Roman altar, ceramics, and the remains of Roman sandals.

Pembroke Castle has been a seat of power for centuries. It was the birthplace of Henry Tudor, father of Henry VIII, and is one of the country’s best preserved medieval strongholds, containing a maze of passages, tunnels and stairways, as well as a vast gatehouse tower. Scientists have discovered that the fortress has also been concealing a startling secret. A cave, known as Wogan Cavern, which lies directly underneath Pembroke Castle, has been found to contain a treasure trove of prehistoric material, including ancient bones and stone tools left behind by early Homo sapiens and possibly by Neanderthals.

These remains will provide key information about the settling of Britain in prehistoric times, say scientists, who last week began their first major excavation of the year at Wogan. Work on the site over coming years should provide answers to major puzzles about prehistoric Britain, including the end of the Neanderthals’ occupation about 40,000 years ago.

Early finds at Wogan include a wide range of fossils including mammoth, reindeer, and woolly rhino, as well as the remains of a hippopotamus, a species that last wallowed in British waters 125,000 years ago. Archaeologists have also found that much of the cavern’s floor is covered with a layer of stalagmite which has preserved the soil, bones, proteins and DNA that lie below.

“The site has got fantastic potential,” said Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London. “It’s the best prospect that we have got in providing fresh material that can help us find out how Neanderthals lived in Britain and learn how they were replaced by Homo sapiens.”

An amateur detectorist has described how he unearthed a bronze age hoard, including a rare sword, after getting lost during a treasure hunters’ rally.

John Belgrave, 60, became separated from the main group of detectorists and headed to higher ground to try to spot them when he made what he has called the find of a lifetime.

His device activated as he walked along and when he dug down he uncovered a rapier sword dating back to the middle bronze age.

The 61cm (2ft) rapier had been deliberately broken into three pieces and placed in the ground alongside the remains of a wealthy landowner.

Unusually, the hilt, though cast in bronze, was shaped to mimic a wooden handle. Only two similar rapiers have been found in Britain before and they were incomplete.

As well as the rapier, a palstave axe head and a decorative arm bangle were found, presumably buried as an offering.

Dorset Museum and Art Gallery raised £17,000 to buy the objects, with the proceeds shared between Belgrave and the landowner.

A study by students from the University of the Highlands and Islands has revealed that a promontory in the Loch of Wasdale in Firth, Orkney, could be the remains of an ancient crannog.

A crannog is a partially or entirely artificial island, typically built in lakes and estuarine waters of Scotland from the prehistoric period onward

Despite significant variations in methodology, most crannogs on mainland Scotland were built by driving timber piles into the loch bed and filling the interior with peat, brush, stones, or timber to create a solid foundation.

In largely treeless regions like the Western Isles, these island dwellings utilised a diverse mix of natural, artificially enlarged, or entirely artificial islets.

The discovery was made by students from the UHI Archaeology Institute, who were conducting test-pitting on a promontory at the northern end of the Loch of Wasdale.

According to a press statement by UHI: “It appears as an islet on the 1882 Ordnance Survey map. Little is known about the site, but the fact the shoreside edges appear to show the remains of walling led to the suggestion it may be a crannog.”

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The test-pitting revealed large quantities of cairn-like rubble, in addition to more structural remains or a stone surface, indicating that the entire promontory/islet is artificial.

Martin Carruthers, a lecturer at UHI, said: “A structure made up of some very large masonry seems to lurk at the heart of the cairn makeup. Constructing this ‘monument’ must have been a very substantial undertaking.”

“In terms of artefacts, apart from some later post-medieval glazed pottery, we recovered a single worked flint, probably a ‘thumbnail’ scraper, which is most likely later Neolithic in date,” added Carruthers.

The Castlerigg stone circle, located in the northwestern county of Cumbria within the Lake District National Park, has long been a draw for tourists and was taken into guardianship in 1883—becoming one of the first prehistoric monuments in the country to receive state protection.

The monument is thought to be one of the oldest stone circles on the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, of which there are hundreds of known examples. England comprises most of the island of Great Britain, which it shares with the countries of Scotland and Wales.

Previous estimates based on circumstantial evidence have placed the construction of the Castlerigg stone circle at around 3000 B.C. or slightly earlier. But no solid dating work has been conducted at the site.

Now, Cumbrian archaeologist Steve Dickinson has shed new light on the monument's possible age, proposing—based on his recent research—that at least part of the stone circle was erected around 3700 B.C., he told Newsweek.

The part Dickinson is referring to is known as the "Sanctuary"—a rectangle of large boulders, measuring around 23 feet by 15 feet, that projects into the middle of the stone circle from its eastern interior.

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While the function of the Sanctuary remains a mystery, the plan and size of this structure is similar to that of many small timber structures excavated in Ireland—and one recently uncovered in the English county of Yorkshire—all dated to the early Neolithic archaeological period, Dickinson said. In Britain and Ireland, this period lasted from around 4300 B.C. to 3300 B.C.

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The fact that the Sanctuary displays similarities to examples of small early Neolithic timber structures from Ireland is significant, according to Dickinson.

Radiocarbon dating of these timber structures suggests their construction began around 3730-3660 B.C. and that their use ended between roughly 3640-3600 B.C. This evidence is one of the reasons that Dickinson is proposing an early Neolithic date for the construction of the Castlerigg Sanctuary.

"The first part of my case for an early Neolithic Castlerigg is that the Castlerigg rectangular structure replicates the forms of some of the Irish examples. It monumentalizes them in stone," he said.

"This monumentalizing in stone is a feature of the timber to stone transition widely regarded by many prehistorians as occurring across Britain and Ireland where enclosures and circles marked out with timber posts were turned into, or remodeled in, stone," he said.

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"The second part of my early Neolithic case for Castlerigg is that the Sanctuary there was erected around 3700-3640 B.C.—following the use-life of the Irish structures," Dickinson said.

Dickinson's proposal has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and will likely require further research to confirm it. But if the theory is correct, it would date the Sanctuary to around 700 years before the first phase of construction at Stonehenge, which occurred around 3000-2900 B.C.—long before the large stones made an appearance.

Vindolanda (translated as “white field” or “white moor”) was a Roman auxiliary fort that guarded a major highway called the Stanegate.

No less than nine forts were built of timber or stone at Vindolanda from between AD 85 to AD 370, creating one of the most complex archaeological sites in Britain and a unique cultural legacy of frontier life.

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During the latest season of excavations, a possible phallus symbol has been uncovered in the last remaining turfed area within the boundaries of the fort. The symbol is carved into a stone slab and could be a depiction of a fascinus, used to invoke divine protection.

Phallic imagery can be found across the Roman world in sculptures, mosaics, frescoes, and portable objects such as pendants or bulla.

The Roman’s believed that the phallus was the embodiment of a masculine generative power, and was one of the tokens of the safety of the state (sacra Romana) that gave protection and good fortune.

Along the corridor of Hadrian’s Wall, there are 59 known phalli which consist of incised, relief, or sculpture phalli. Each architectural type of phalli have been grouped into one of nine morphological traits: the rocket, the hammer, the kinky-winky, the splitcock, the pointer, the double-dong, running hard, the beast, and the lucky dip.

The Inverclyde Time Teamers, say they have found a previously unrecorded prehistoric hut circle, dating from between 1200BC and 500AD on the moors, just under a mile north east of Haylie viewpoint

Two of the detectives, Stephen McAllister and Allan Kinniburgh, were surveying the piece of land during Sunday afternoon after aerial photographs and computerised mapping and scanning equipment indicated it was a possible hotspot.

Stephen said: “Our target presented as circular structure with a very well defined raised outline, approximately 10 metres across.

"We thought it might have been a sheep ree, remnants of an Iron Age defensive dun or a prehistoric enclosure.

“Having had a closer inspection, and comparing this with similar structures we have visited or discovered, we have a very high level of confidence in announcing this as something that looks like a previously unrecorded prehistoric dwelling or hut circle find.

Archaeologists are conducting the first dig in a country park for almost 30 years.

Wandlebury Country Park invited teams from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge Archaeological Unit on a two-week dig.

They will investigate the archaeological past of Wandlebury, where excavations were last carried out between 1994 and 1997.

The park, near Cambridge, is celebrating its 70th anniversary after it became a public open space on 26 April 1954.

Wandlebury sits on top of a small chalk hill and is home to an Iron Age hillfort, referred to as the Wandlebury Ring, which is around 1000ft (300m) in diameter.

A buried hoard of coins dating to the 16th and 17th Centuries has been found during renovation work on a cottage.

The cache of more than 1,000 gold and silver coins was discovered under an earth floor at South Poorton, Dorset.

One of the property's new owners, Robert Fooks, was digging with a pickaxe by torchlight when he found the trove in a pottery bowl.

Auctioneers hope to sell the collection for between £15,000 and £30,000.

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The hoard, discovered in October 2019, was returned to the couple this year after expert analysis and legal work.

The British Museum guessed they were deposited early in the English Civil War (1642-51) by a landowner trying to keep his wealth safe.

The collection, including James I and Charles I gold coins and Elizabeth I silver shillings, is being sold by Duke's Auctions in Dorchester on Tuesday.

Mrs Fooks said the property's previous owners came close to finding the hoard.

She said: "They had removed the flooring on top of the earth and stopped work. The coins were about 10 inches (25cm) further down."

The rising and setting of the sun at Stonehenge, especially during the summer and winter solstices, continues to evoke joy, fascination and religious devotion.

Now a project has been launched to delve into the lesser understood links that may exist between the monument and the moon during a once-in-a-generation lunar event.

A “major lunar standstill”, which takes place once every 18.6 years, when moonrise and moonset reach their farthest apart points along the horizon, will take place in January 2025.

This will give archaeologists, astronomers and archaeoastronomers a rare chance to explore theories surrounding the event and the ancient people of Stonehenge. Some experts believe the people who built the monument were aware of the major lunar standstill and may have buried their dead in a particular part of the site because of its relationship to the phenomenon.