A close look at Blick Mead and Star Carr

This is very exciting. It’s not often we get large excavation monographs devoted to single mesolithic sites in the UK (Three Ways Wharf stands out, a site that was published in 2011 and excavated in the 1980s), but recently within the space of a few weeks we got two: Blick Mead in mid March (photo …

Stonehenge deserves better than this

You may have noticed that Blick Mead was in the press today. I’m writing a feature rounding up all the recent excavations in and around the world heritage site for a future British Archaeology (you will be astonished at how much there is!), so I thought I’d have a look at the story. Excavation at …

The Blick Mead tooth conundrum

I wrote a long blog about Stonehenge the other day, featuring the road tunnel and a dog tooth from Blick Mead. David Jacques commented on the latter, and gave a link to the Buckingham University press release on the story. It confirms that Peter Rowley-Conwy, of Durham University, said “the dog would have been roughly the …

The strange case of the dog in the Stonehenge tunnel

It had been pretty quiet in Stonehenge media land. We had an excavation at Durrington Walls in August that got a bit of attention. This was thin stuff compared to the coverage given last year to the geophysics sensation that the dig overturned, though what we now have is far more significant (and so features …

Tunnel truths

ICOMOS and UNESCO are visiting Stonehenge this week, to ponder the current set of road tunnel proposals. A lot has changed since we were last thinking about such a tunnel. Despite stories in the press, these changes add up to a much better proposition than the one that had, in principle, been accepted a decade …

What has the mesolithic got to do with Stonehenge? Not a lot

I’m editing Greg Bailey’s column for the next British Archaeology, and one of the broadcasts he reviews is BBC2’s Horizon film, First Britons. I enjoyed it, some nice film at interesting sites with a strong narrative. As a specialist in British prehistory, I’d take issue with a few details (and one or two larger points), …