No spin at Stonehenge in 1920

Here are two more press cuttings, reporting the start of excavations and restorations at Stonehenge directed by William Hawley in 1919 and 1920. A lot happened in those first few months of what became a project lasting years: stones 6 and 7 in the outer circle were set in concrete, after their pits had been …

What people were saying about Woodhenge in 1927

I’ve been thinking about what was happening at Stonehenge in the early 20th century recently, and unearthed some old cuttings in my library. Here’s one about Woodhenge, I think from The Salisbury Times. It’s strangely coy (“two well-known Wiltshire archaeologists” were, of course, Maud and Ben Cunnington), but it reminds us that everything we know …

What made Stonehenge so interesting in the 1870s?

I’ve just discovered Google’s Ngram, which is fun to play with. It will search for words and phrases within a million scanned books. This is what it did with “prehistory” and “Stonehenge”. “Prehistoric” first appeared in print in English in 1851, and you can see a steady spread here of the use of “prehistory”. (If …

Frogs porn and all that springy stuff

I'm really not going to make a habit of this, but the days are getting longer, the sun is shining and the five-year-old had to draw spring for her homework. I think this drawing just about sums it up. It's the phonetic spelling that gets the sap to rise.

A five-year-old’s view of arkeeolijee

The vision of an archaeologist excited by the discovery of a human skull as big as their spoilheap is somewhat undermined by the inscription which, if you can’t read primary school phonetics, reads: “Archaeologists dig for bones, and they have been doing that for a very long time. If you wonder what they do with …

Jeremy Deller & Gabriel Moshenska

I was in London earlier this week to talk to two people who will be appearing in the next edition of British Archaeology. This is Jeremy Deller in his local Italian restaurant, the Trevi, where we talked about his work while he had Marmite toast and tea. He has an entertaining and inspiring show on …