Over the last couple of years, GUARD Archaeology teams led by GUARD Archaeologists Warren Bailie and Kevin Mooney, have discovered a range of prehistoric archaeology spanning 7000 years of activity, during excavations undertaken in advance of the A75 Dunragit Bypass in Dumfries and Galloway in south-west Scotland.

Funded by Transport Scotland and carried out in collaboration with Amey and RJ McLeod, the archaeological remains include the earliest known house in south-west Scotland dating to the Mesolithic period, as well as a Neolithic structure, Neolithic/Early Bronze Age stone lined cists, a Bronze Age cemetery complex and an Iron Age village.

The remains of a Mesolithic house was discovered in an area of criss-crossing palaeochannels, on the edge of a former estuary which existed here throughout prehistory. Radiocarbon dates recovered from the Mesolithic house revealed that this settlement dates to around 6000 BC. A perforated stone adze was found on the Mesolithic site, not a common find on sites of this period and which may have been used to work wood. In excess of 13,500 Mesolithic flint microliths and knapping waste were also recovered, indicating that this site represents a core focus of Mesolithic activity in Dumfries and Galloway. The location here, on a coastal fringe, was probably deliberately chosen by the occupants to exploit readily available resources of fish and shellfish seaward and hunting grounds close at hand in the hinterland.

Neolithic remains were also found, and which may be related to the nearby ceremonial complex at Dunragit, previously excavated by Manchester University between 1999 and 2002. This comprised three concentric rings of timber posts, which had been preceded by a post-defined cursus monument. These remains were first spotted through aerial photography and the only visible part of this ceremonial complex is Droughduil Mote, a prominent conical shaped mound to the south of Dunragit. This was once assumed to be a medieval motte but the Manchester University excavation revealed it to be a Neolithic mound, perhaps used, like the better known Silbury Hill in south-west England, as an elevated platform in ceremonies, before an Early Bronze Age cairn was built on it summit.

The new bypass route was carefully selected to avoid this archaeology and other known archaeological cropmarks, most of which are scheduled monuments. However, amongst the new archaeological remains discovered during the removal of topsoil from the A75 Bypass route, were Neolithic remains perhaps associated with the ceremonial complex.

A Neolithic structure or house was found by the GUARD Archaeology team, constructed of multiple posts and from which amongst the flint and pottery artefacts was found a leaf-shaped flint arrowhead of Neolithic date. This rectilinear structure lay on a ridge overlooking the lower lying area of the Mesolithic site.

On this same ridge the GUARD Archaeology team also recovered two jet necklaces from two separate stone-lined pits or cists, as well as a beaker and food vessel. The jet necklaces are of exceptional quality, made from jet that originated from Yorkshire and are the first such jet necklaces to be found in Galloway, indeed the first such jet necklaces to be found in Scotland in many years.

The Beaker pottery dates to the end of the Neolithic/ beginning of the Bronze Age period and may be linked to the introduction of the Beaker Culture from Europe into south-west Scotland at that time.

No bone survived in either cist, but further post-excavation work is expected to include chemical tests to tell us whether the bodies were removed from their graves or if these were ritual deposits or cenotaphs. These cemeteries appear to have been used over the late third and second millennia BC.

Two Bronze Age cemeteries were also discovered. 20 cremations of likely Bronze Age date were excavated, including three Barrows. Finds from the excavations here included several fragmentary urns and one wholly intact example which contained the cremated remains of an adult. Flint artefacts were also recovered and one of particular interest was a very finely serrated transverse flint blade

The remains of six Iron Age round-houses were also discovered. Known Iron Age settlements in Galloway tend to be enclosed by palisades or ramparts and found predominantly on hilltops, higher ground, coastal promontories or lochs, forming defended duns, hill forts, promontory forts or crannogs. Unenclosed settlements of the Iron Age tend to comprise single houses, but the Dunragit settlement is unusual in appearing to be a large unenclosed settlement on low-lying ground.

It is only the second such Iron Age village to be found in Galloway, a previous one being discovered last year on the banks of the Black Loch of Myrton in the Machars. Iron Age pottery, which is not normally found on Iron Age settlements in Galloway was recovered from the Dunragit round-houses, as well as a Romano-British Iron Age brooch and evidence of metalworking. While radiocarbon dating has still to be undertaken, the artefacts indicate occupation of this settlement around two thousand years ago.

It is not certain if the Romans had a specific positive or negative influence on this community but the settlement appears to have been occupied during the Roman occupation in the early centuries AD and a Roman road passes close by.

GUARD Archaeology’s post-excavation work on these finds is due to commence soon, but the wealth of unforeseen finds recovered from Dunragit is likely to reveal new insights into prehistoric Scotland from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age eras, encompassing a range of ceremonial, burial and domestic structures and activities, and revealing the development, transformation and demise of a densely occupied prehistoric landscape.

By evaluating the bacteria and fungi found in fossilized feces, microbiologists are providing evidence to help support archeologists’ hypotheses regarding cultures living in the Caribbean over 1,500 years ago. They report their findings today at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

“Although fossilized feces (coprolites) have frequently been studied, they had never been used as tools to determine ethnicity and distinguish between two extinct cultures. By examining the DNA preserved in coprolites from two ancient indigenous cultures, our group was able to determine the bacterial and fungal populations present in each culture as well as their possible diets,” says Jessica Rivera-Perez of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, who presented the study.

Various indigenous cultures inhabited the Greater Antilles thousands of years ago. The Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico have thousands of pre-Columbian indigenous settlements belonging to extinct cultures that migrated to the Caribbean at some point in history.

Archaeological excavations in Vieques, Puerto Rico unearthed hand-made tools and crafts as well as fossilized feces dating from 200 to 400 A.D. The presence of two distinct styles of craftsmanship, as well as other clues obtained from the dig sites, suggested these artifacts belonged to two distinct cultures.

“One culture excelled in the art of pottery; in fact, their signature use of red and white paint helped identify them as descendants from the Saladoids, originating in Saladero, Venezuela. In contrast, the second culture had exquisite art for crafting semiprecious stones into ornaments, some of which represented the Andean condor. This helped archaeologists identify the Bolivian Andes as possible origins of this Huecoid culture,” says Rivera-Perez.

To help confirm these archeological hypotheses, Rivera-Perez and her colleagues examined the DNA preserved in coprolites from both Saladoid and Huecoid settlements and compared the bacterial and fungal populations found in each. Major differences were detected between the fecal communities of these cultures, providing additional support that they may have had different origins. Additionally, they found fungal and corn DNA in the Huecoid coprolite that suggests the consumption of an Andean fermented corn beverage, further confirming the theory that the Huecoids originated in the Bolivian Andes.

“The study of the paleomicrobiome of coprolites supports the hypothesis of multiple ancestries and can provide important evidence regarding migration by ancestral cultures and populations of the Caribbean,” says Rivera-Perez.

Header Image : Example of a coprolite: Lloyds Bank coprolite : fossilised human faeces dug up from York, England by archaeologists.

Following questions about the validity of using a genetic sample from a modern day relative of Richard III to help identify his remains, Dr Turi King of the University of Leicester guides us through the process she used.

I’m afraid I must start with a quick DNA primer! I promise to keep it short. Our DNA can be divided into two different sorts: nuclear DNA (which is so called because it’s found in the nucleus of our cells) which is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, and mitochondrial DNA (which is found outside the nucleus of the cell).

The DNA being used in this analysis is primarily (more about that later!) mitochondrial DNA. Indeed this is the DNA of choice for two reasons. The first of these is that after death the usual mechanisms which keep our DNA molecules long and healthy (and easy to analyze) no longer work. Our DNA begins to break down into tiny fragments and it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve any DNA to analyze. While there is only one copy of our nuclear DNA in each cell, there are many hundreds of copies of our mitochondrial DNA, so if any DNA has survived that is sufficient to be analyzed, it will be mtDNA. The other reason that mitochondrial DNA is so useful in this case is that it’s passed down the female line: from mothers to children – but only daughters pass it on. Richard III would have inherited his mitochondrial DNA from his mother – as would any of his siblings – and his sisters would have passed it on too, down through the generations to any of their female-line descendants.

We are fortunate to have a female-line relative of Richard III in the form of Michael Ibsen. Some years ago,
the historian John Ashdown-Hill was researching Richard III’s family tree and he discovered an unbroken female line from Anne of York to Joy Ibsen – Michael’s mum. Within weeks of the remains being found, Professor Kevin Schürer, Pro Vice Chancellor for Research at the University, who is also an expert in surnames and genealogy, managed to find another female-line relative of Richard III, who wishes to remain anonymous. Anne of York and Richard will both have inherited their mtDNA from their mum Cecily, who passed her mtDNA type down through the maternal line to Michael and this second lineage. So essentially I was able to compare the mitochondrial DNA from the skeletal remains with that of his two female-line relatives and see if there is a match consistent with them being related – which there was.

Now, I say primarily mitochondrial DNA was being used as there is one of our chromosomes (found in the nucleus) which could be used to help identify the remains as well. Our 23rd pair of chromosomes is our sex chromosome pair. Women have two copies of the X chromosome (XX) and men have an X chromosome but also a Y chromosome (XY). The Y chromosome has the gene for maleness it can only be passed down the male line. As part of this project, genealogical evidence has been used to identify putative modern-day male-line only relatives, a number of whom have been kind enough to take part in our study. Should it be possible to retrieve Y chromosome DNA from the skeletal remains, this will be analyzed and compared with the modern relatives to see if there is a match down the male line as well.

On Monday 4th February the results of tests on a skeleton found beneath a Leicester carpark were announced to a global media audience. Lead archaeologist Richard Buckley stated ‘our academic conclusion, beyond reasonable doubt, is that the individual exhumed at Greyfriars in September 2012 is indeed Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England.’ Matthew Symonds and Carly Hilts look at what this momentous announcement tells us about Richard, and why the Leicester team are so confident they have got their man.

We now know that it was for want of a helmet, not a horse, that Richard III’s kingdom was lost. Tradition has it that as battle raged across fields near Bosworth on the 22nd August 1485, Richard saw Henry Tudor and his escort detach themselves from the rest of their army. Sensing an opportunity to decide the battle – and secure his throne – Richard charged. Whether it was overconfidence from an impetuous warrior king or a last roll of the dice from a man with nothing left to lose is impossible to say. But whatever provoked this final act of Plantagenet generalship, it proved a gamble too far. Outnumbered and then cut off, England’s last Medieval king went down fighting.

The king is dead
Careful study of Richard’s skeleton by Jo Appleby, an osteologist at the University of Leicester, revealed 10 perimortem wounds – that is, injuries occurring at or around the time of death. Eight were to his head, of which only two had been found when CA last reported on Richard (CA 272). As none of these wounds intersect it is impossible to be certain about the order in which they were sustained. It is unlikely, though, that any occurred while Richard was either wearing his helmet or riding a horse.

There is a strong chance, then, that these injuries provide a window into Richard’s last stand: cut off from his army, fighting on foot, his helmet lost, and his comrades falling around him. Three sword or halberd thrusts found Richard’s unprotected scalp, slicing through the skin to shave slivers of bone off the vault of his skull. A fourth blade successfully punctured the top of his skull. Painful but not fatal, the king appears to have fought on, bleeding profusely.

Taken at face value, Richard’s wounds seem to suggest a horrifying end: surrounded by foes while hacking and stabbing blows from swords and halberds rained down on all sides. Deliverance, when it came, took the form of two blows to the back of Richard’s head. One tore through to the inner surface of his skull a full 10.5cm from its entry point. The other was administered with such force that it cleaved away a chunk of skull and exposed the brain. A portion of the severed bone was left dangling on a flap of skin, carrying it to the Greyfriars grave. Consistent with injuries caused by a powerful halberd strike, if the blade had penetrated 7cm into Richard’s brain death would have been instant. Even if it did not, rapid loss of consciousness would have spared him any more. And there was more to come.

Blades that scored a rib and sliced Richard’s right pelvis should have been turned by his armour during combat. Historical sources, however, indicate the perfect opportunity for such injuries to occur. After death Richard’s corpse was stripped naked and slung over a horse like a saddlebag for its inglorious ride back to Leicester. It suggests that one onlooker took this opportunity to affirm their allegiance to the new royal line in a manner that was as crude as it was unambiguous. Drawing a dagger, they thrust its blade upward into Richard’s right buttock with enough force to penetrate the underlying bone.

Lying in a state
A reconstruction of Grey Friars church, where Richard III was buried. Credit - Jill Atherton/University of
LeicesterThanks to the University of Leicester Archaeological Services excavations we now know that following this public spectacle Richard’s remains were delivered to Leicester Greyfriars for burial. Despite occupying a prestigious location in the order’s church choir – as befitted a crowned Christian monarch – Richard’s interment was a far cry from the pomp of a state funeral.

In contrast to the neat grave shafts encountered elsewhere at Greyfriars and in Medieval Leicester, Richard’s was shallow – lying just 0.68m below modern ground level – and roughly cut with sloping sides, a concave base and an irregular shape. Rather than being laid flat, the body appears to have been bundled into the too-short cut legs first, with the head propped up against a corner of the shaft, its mandible lolling vacantly.

An absence of iron nails and copper pins indicates that the deceased was dignified with neither a coffin nor shroud. The position of Richard’s arms does, though, suggest that one accessory accompanied him to the grave. In a Medieval burial the body’s arms normally run neatly parallel to the side, but Richard’s reached untidily across his body, with his hands cupped over the pelvis. Crossed right over left at the wrists, his arms bear all the hallmarks of being bound when he was buried. If so, it seems that his corpse was committed to posterity as the captive Richard refused to be in life.

A life less ordinary
Richard's remains. The sideways curve of his spine - evidence of severe scoliosis - can be claerly seen. Credit - University of LeicesterSo what can the Greyfriars skeleton tell us about the man whose life ended so ignominiously? It is now well known that Richard III suffered from severe scoliosis – a sideways curvature of the spine. This condition would have significantly shortened his height while standing. Analysis of the skeleton suggests that Richard’s natural height was around 5’8”. This is above average for the period, but unsurprising given that his brother, Edward IV, was also unusually tall. Measuring 6’4”, Edward still holds the record as England’s tallest monarch. Although it is impossible to be certain how many inches the scoliosis cost Richard, the difference could well have been as much as a foot. His right shoulder would have been raised higher than his left.

A life less ordinary
So what can the Greyfriars skeleton tell us about the man whose life ended so ignominiously? It is now well known that Richard III suffered from severe scoliosis – a sideways curvature of the spine. This condition would have significantly shortened his height while standing. Analysis of the skeleton suggests that Richard’s natural height was around 5’8”. This is above average for the period, but unsurprising given that his brother, Edward IV, was also unusually tall. Measuring 6’4”, Edward still holds the record as England’s tallest monarch. Although it is impossible to be certain how many inches the scoliosis cost Richard, the difference could well have been as much as a foot. His right shoulder would have been raised higher than his left.


Another conspicuous feature of the skeleton is the gracile nature of its bones, indicating that Richard had a slender, feminine build. This matches historical accounts of the king, suggesting that the more lurid allegations colouring the Tudor propaganda are exaggerations flowing from a wellspring of truth, rather than the entirely unfounded lies some suspected. Whether the same is true of his character is for historians, not archaeologists, to divine.

Proof of identity
So how can we be sure the remains are those of Richard? While a strong case for the skeleton being the king’s could be made on the strength of its location, its treatment, the curvature of its spine and the clear signs of a battlefield death, further scientific tests were also carried out. Two samples of bone from the ribs were sent to radiocarbon dating labs at the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow. As well as revealing that the individual enjoyed an unusually high protein diet – including large quantities of seafood – for the period, as would befit a prince of the realm, the samples furnished dates that were in close agreement. Once calibrated, and taking into account the tendency for a high seafood diet to return an older radiocarbon date, they indicate a range of AD 1455-1540, entirely consistent with death in 1485.

The project also undertook high profile DNA testing. Turi King, a University of Leicester geneticist, successfully secured a DNA sample from the skeleton’s tooth. This was compared to two direct descendents on the maternal side through Richard’s sister, Anne of York. One was Michel Ibsen, the other was a distant cousin who wished to remain anonymous. Analysis of these three sets of mitochondrial DNA allowed Turi King to conclude that ‘there is a DNA match between the maternal DNA from the family of Richard III and the skeletal remains we found at the Grey Friars dig.’

On 12th September the University of Leicester held an extraordinary press conference. They announced that a three week dig seeking the remains of Richard III had ‘entered a new phase’ with DNA testing under way on an adult male skeleton. So what had they discovered? Richard Buckley, Jo Appleby, and Helen Foxhall Forbes told Matthew Symonds and Carly Hilts.  

He has become one our most celebrated literary villains: a power-crazed child killer struck down by bloody nemesis at Bosworth. Shakespeare’s Richard III is a murderous hunchback twisted both inside and out by the deformity that repels his peers. But while this spectacular character assassination plays fast and loose with historical events, Shakespeare’s monster is merely the fullest flowering of a Tudor drive to discredit the last Plantagenet king. This victor’s history has proven so effective that controversy rages to this day about almost every aspect of the man behind the myth, right down to the true nature – if any – of his famous disability.

Richard III’s short reign ran from 1483-1485. Appointed Lord Protector of the 12-year-old son of Edward
IV following the king’s death, Richard was soon on the throne himself. After Edward IV’s marriage was declared invalid, Richard’s coronation followed on 6th July 1483. It proved a controversial start to a controversial reign. Dogged by accusations that he had murdered the princes – Edward IV’s sons – in the tower, and facing political unrest Richard proved unable to consolidate his grip on power. Instead, on the 22nd August 1485 his army was defeated by Henry Tudor’s at Bosworth Field, west of Leicester. Killed during the battle, Richard III became the last English king to fall in combat.

It is recorded that after the battle Richard was ‘brought dead off the field unto the town of Leicester, and there was laid openly, that every man might see and look upon him.’ What happened next is less clear. Many myths have grown up about the fate of Richard’s body, including a tradition that it was hurled off Bow Bridge into the River Soar. In around 1490, however, John Rous noted that Richard ‘finally was buried in the choir of the Friars Minor [Greyfriars] at Leicester.’ Further Tudor sources also name Greyfriars, while a sum of £10 1s drawn from Henry VII’s household accounts in September 1495 seemingly paid for Richard’s tomb there. Locating the friary – and in particular its church choir – seemed a promising start for any attempt to find his body.

Finding the friary

Founded by the Franciscan order in 1230, Leicester Greyfriars was one of the first friaries built in England, but it suffered the same fate as many other religious buildings during the 16th-century Dissolution of the Monasteries. In the years following its suppression in 1538, the friary was plundered for building materials – recycled in numerous local construction projects and repairs to nearbySt Martin’s church. Over time its precise location was lost.

When the Richard III Society approached University of Leicester Archaeological Services’ (ULAS) Richard Buckley about the possibility of an excavation to find the friary’s church – and Richard III’s grave site – it seemed like a long shot. Historic mapping suggested that the most likely location for the religious complex was now covered by modern redevelopment, with just one accessible area: a small carpark behind the buildings of Leicester City Council. With no guarantee the body had survived the Dissolution – if it had ever been there – Richard Buckley summed up the odds by offering to eat his hat if they found the missing monarch. But as there had never been an archaeological investigation of the site, the project seemed like an opportunity to examine the friary itself.

Preliminary work in the carpark using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) was not promising, revealing modern service pipes but nothing to suggest the presence of a Medieval religious complex immured beneath the tarmac. This is not an uncommon issue for archaeologists in Leicester, where the deep and complex urban stratigraphy often defies GPR survey. Undeterred, the team decided to excavate two long, narrow trial trenches running 30m north-south. They reasoned that as a religious site is likely to be oriented east-west, cutting trenches across this axis should pick up at least some of its walls. It proved an inspired tactic.

O’erlook the walls

In the second of the two exploratory trenches, the ULAS team found the remains of two parallel walls about
2m apart. Running between these was a mortar floor that clearly preserved the impressions of diagonally laid square tiles. While these had been removed during the friary’s demolition for reuse elsewhere, many broken tiles were dumped as rubble. Some were locally made and feature colourful decorative motifs familiar from ULAS investigations at nearby Medieval sites such as Leicester abbey. Others came from further afield, with a fine example from the Wessex group of tiles displaying an eagle design.


The narrow walkway was clearly a passage of some kind, and given the religious nature of the site, the team wondered whether they had found part of Greyfriars’ cloisters. If confirmed, the friary church was likely to be nearby – and if they could only establish which side of the cloister range they had unearthed, they could extrapolate the best place to look.

Another key piece of the jigsaw emerged in trench 1: two robbed out walls from a 5m-wide building that joined the cloister walk at a right angle, and which also had a mortar floor marked with tile imprints. Against each of the wall lines was a large block of stone: the remains of benches where monks sat during meetings about the daily running of the friary. The team had found Greyfriars’ chapter house. By comparing the site’s layout to plans of other friaries, this suggested that they had located the eastern side of the cloister range. The church was likely to be close.

The remains of Richard III are to be re-interred in Leicester Cathedral – likely next spring – a judicial review concluded today (23 May).


Addressing crowds of journalists in the cathedral, shortly after the High Court handed down their decision at 10am, the Rt Rvd Tim Stevens, Bishop of Leicester, announced that the judges had ruled that the Ministry of Justice license granted at the outset of the University of Leicester’s excavations on the Grey Friars site (see CA 272 for more on this project),  - which stated that, if found, Richard’s bones would be reburied in Leicester Cathedral – should be upheld.

The license had been contested as, after the identity of the skeleton had been confirmed (see CA 277), the Plantagenet Alliance, a group of 15 distant relatives of the king, argued that there should have been wider consultation before Richard’s final resting place was determined. But now, following nine weeks of deliberation, their legal challenge has been dismissed.

‘We are of course delighted that the ruling has gone in our favour – we can now begin planning for the re-interment to proceed with dignity and honour, ‘ said Bishop Stevens.

He went on to read out a postscript that the judges had appended to their ruling:


‘Since Richard III’s exhumation on 5 September 2012, passions have been roused and much ink has been spilt. Issues relating to his life and death and place of re-interment have been exhaustively examined and debated. The Very Reverend David Monteith, the Dean of Leicester Cathedral, has explained the considerable efforts and expenditure invested by the Cathedral in order to create a lasting burial place “as befits an annointed king”. We agree that it is time for Richard III to be given a dignified reburial, and finally laid to rest. ‘

Dean David Monteith added that he hoped the ceremonies surrounding Richard’s re-interment would help to foster a spirit of cooperation and reconciliation between differing parties.

‘Wherever you sat on this matter, everyone is welcome to participate in what comes next,’ he said. ‘We are going to lay a man and an annointed king to rest, and we should do this as one community and one nation working together to ensure it is done with dignity and honour. ‘

Plans for the reburial itself are still in progress, though it is expected that the ceremony will involve events over four or five days, during which Richard’s remains will be taken back to Bosworth battlefield, before being processed back into Leicester via a number of sites associated with the battle, and churchyards where other people killed on that day are buried.

Richard III will then lie in state in the cathedral for a number of days to allow members of the public to pay their respects, after which he will be buried in a tomb (the revised design of which is to be unveiled in 3-4 weeks) just a few feet from the ledger stone currently dedicated to him in the cathedral’s choir.

‘The cathedral is a working building so the location of the tomb had to allow for the circulation of people, and the performance of services, ‘ said Richard Buckley of University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS), who directed the Grey Friars Project. ‘The choir is also the part of the church where Richard was originally buried at Grey Friars, but the new location is a definite upgrade: before, he had been laid to rest in a place of ambiguous honour – he was only just inside the choir, about as far from the altar as you can get, and hidden away in a part of the church that the public did not have access to. But now he will be at the eastern end of the choir, very close to the altar – it is a much more honourable position.’

The judges’ ruling also sets an important precedent for future archaeological work, he added.

‘It is normal practice, when excavating burials that are around 100 years old or less, to advertise in the local press to give close relatives the right to come forward and be consulted before exhumation, ‘ he said. ‘But with Richard III’s remains, the bones were over 500 years old, so normally you wouldn’t be expected to consult on them. Our worry was that, if the review had gone against us, in future excavations we would be looking at a situation where, if any earlier burials were found to be identifiable, whether at the excavation or analysis stage, we would potentially have to consult all of their relatives – that would just be unworkable. You can imagine, we are very relieved that the result has gone the way it did!’

Between 850,000 and 950,000 years ago a small party set out across the upper reaches of an estuary. The group was made up of at least five individuals, including adults and children, while the tidal mudflats they were navigating lay at the mouth of what is now the Thames. Flowing almost 100 miles north of its current course, the river debouched into the North Sea through modern Norfolk.

There is nothing to suggest that the group’s journey was in any way extraordinary. Its members ambled slowly in a southerly direction, following the course of the river and frequently making detours towards its channel. These people did not return the way they came, but they left a jumbled mass of footprints in their wake.

Those fragile impressions in the soft esturine clay proved remarkably durable. At high tide they were submerged and swiftly filled with the sediments that would preserve them for almost a million years. By the time the footprints reappeared, in May 2013, they were the earliest traces of a human journey in Britain.

Stepping-off point
The waters that exposed the ancient footprints at Happisburgh are no longer laying down sediments. Instead,
that stretch of Norfolk coastline is retreating at an alarming pace. As we saw in Current Archaeology 288, the same waves collapsing cliff faces and demolishing houses are exposing the remains of long-extinct animals – and the earliest traces of human activity ever discovered in Britain. It was this archaeological silver-lining that brought Dr Martin Bates of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Lampeter) to Happisburgh last year.

‘I was doing geophysical survey with my brother Richard, to try and map the course of the ancient estuary channels under the modern cliffs,’ Martin explains. ‘As part of that work we lay out 400m of cable and put 80 electrodes into the ground. Our computer spends about an hour taking a series of measurements, and during that time we’ve got nothing to do. So we went and had a look at the deposits on the beach. And there in front of us was this strangely patterned surface.’

The footprints were exposed a short distance to the south of a site the team call Happisburgh 3. Eighty flint tools discovered there are believed to date back between 850,000 – 950,000 years, making them the earliest relics of human activity in Britain. If the footprints belonged to the same period, they would be one of the earliest sets in the world. Only the 3.5m-year-old footprints made by a human ancestor at Laetoli in Tanzania and the 1.5m-year-old examples from Ileret and Koobi Fora in Kenya are more ancient.

Previously the oldest human footprints in Europe were from Roccamonfina in Italy, which date back 350,000 years. So how could the team date the Happisburgh footprints?

‘It is really down to the sediments in which the footprints were made,’ explains Dr Nick Ashton, Co-Director of the Happisburgh Project and British Museum Curator. ‘Elsewhere along the coast, old estuary silts at a similar depth are associated with a range of animal and plant remains. Among them is a very early form of mammoth, for example, which we know became extinct about 800,000 years ago.’

‘The sediments themselves also provide a clue. At the moment, compasses point north, but in the past there have been periods when the Earth’s magnetic field reversed and a compass would have pointed south. Because these sediments were laid down very slowly, the iron minerals within them orientated themselves on the magnetic pole at the time. By measuring that, we can say they formed during a period of reversal. Putting all of this together narrows down the date to between 850,000 and 950,000 years ago.’

‘It was pretty lucky we had as long as we did,’ says Martin. ‘The sand on that beach is very abrasive, and the footprints were simply scoured away over a number of tidal cycles. I don’t know how long they’d been exposed when I saw them, but we are probably looking at a window of about a month in which they could be spotted and recorded before they were lost forever. There were about two weeks between the time when I said “This is what I think they are” and their destruction.’

‘The trail was about 3m wide and 10m long,’ Nick remembers. ‘Its recording took place over several days and used a technique called multiple image photogrammetry, undertaken by Sarah Duffy from York University. This takes a series of images from different angles and uses software to stitch them together into a 3D model. Using colouring to show different depths within the prints we could begin to see the various parts of the feet. In one we could even make out four of the five toes.’

Mud larking
Once the footprints had been recorded, they were studied by Dr Isabelle De Groote at Liverpool John
Moores University. ‘These are clearly human footprints,’ she observes. ‘In the best-preserved prints you can see the heel, the arch of the foot and then the ball of the foot and the toes. Humans are the only ones who leave footprints like these. Other primates have a divergent big toe – that is, one coming out at the side. And humans do a very distinctive heel strike when they walk, rolling off onto the ball of the foot.

‘Both small prints and large prints were present. What I was able to do was measure the length and the width of the footprint in order to estimate how many individuals were there. Over the whole surface there were a huge number of hollows, and I ended up identifying a total of 49 that were clearly footprints. They were made by at least five different people, and there were at least two or three children in the group, the smallest of which can be estimated to have been about 3ft tall.

‘The largest prints, of which there are three, come from a single individual with the equivalent of a modern UK size 8 foot and a height of about 5ft 8in. We believe that this is likely to be a male. A slightly smaller individual could be an adult female, or perhaps a young adult male. There’s no reason why we should not think of them as a family, but because we’re only seeing the prints of a few individuals we cannot be certain whether it was a single family unit or a larger group.’

Nothing beats the excitement of hands-on archaeology, and with the new digging season almost upon us, there is no time to lose.

This is a chance to get practical experience, either before heading off to university, or putting into practice what has been studied in theory. But for most, this is simply a glorious way to pass the time.

Our guide covers the full gamut of locations, periods, and types: from fieldwalking to recording and cataloguing, from early Neolithic to Medieval and later – there is something for everyone. Some jobs require stamina, but many do not. Young or old, fit or not, time rich or time poor, all you need is enthusiasm and a desire to get involved.

Use the options below to sort the digs by area, by cost, or by time period – whatever your budget or area of interest, there will be something to suit you. If you don’t have much time to spare try the ‘Dig for a Day’ list, or ‘All Inclusive’ if you want food and accommodation within the cost. There is also an Advice and Useful Info page that will help you know what to expect, along with advice from both diggers and supervisors, as well as a handy checklist so nothing gets forgotten!

So, if you are passionate about Prehistory, interested in the Iron Age, ruminating about Romans, or looking for a new angle on the Saxons, get out into the fresh air and discover…who knows what?

In your complete guide to archaeological excavations around the country, there is no excuse not to join in: look through our list of digs, find one that suits you – then enjoy getting dirty digging up the past!

Recently discovered rock art on the walls of a cave in the Egyptian Western Desert has been provisionally dated by a Cambridge University archaeologist as between 6,000 and 7,000 years old, created at least 1,000 years before the building of the pyramids. The drawings add weight to the argument that Egyptian culture drew on cultural influences from Africa and not only from the Near East.
Spotted by a tourist to Wadi el Obeiyid, north of Farafra Oasis, drawings of a giraffe, a bovid (cow-like mammal) and two boats, plus the outline of a human hand, were examined last month by Dr Giulio Lucarini who co-leads a team of archaeologists looking at the pathways, and timings, by which domestic animals and plants from the Levant arrived in Egypt. The engravings are thought to have been discovered in 2010. The onset of revolution in Egypt meant that they were not investigated for some time.

Based at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University, Lucarini is an expert
in the transition from foraging to farming in North Africa. With Professor Barbara Barich of ISMEO in Rome, he is co-director of a project (the Archaeological Mission in the Farafra Oasis) that has been studying the archaeology of this region of the Eastern Sahara since the late 1980s.
Earliest artistic evidence
The site of the newly-identified images – which are engraved into the white chalk surface – has been dubbed the Boats Arch, a reference to the shape of the shallow cave. The location is 600 km southwest of Cairo and 50 km into the desert from the nearest paved road at Farafra  – a journey across a desert track surrounded by beautiful sand dunes.
Boats Arch is about 3 km from another site – known as Wadi el Obeiyid Cave – where examples of rock art were first examined by Barich in 1995. The art in this first cave features representations of engraved boats and animals as well as painted hand stencils.  “What’s really exciting is that these drawings are among the earliest artistic evidence of the people who lived in the Farafra and possibly in the whole Eastern Sahara,” said Lucarini.
Rock art is notoriously tricky to date. “The marked similarity in style seen in the bovid, which is probably an oryx, and giraffe in the Boats Arch and the animals in Wadi Obeiyid Cave, dated to around 6000/5500 BC, suggests a similar period for the two sites. In style the boat images correlate to those found on decorated pots from Predynastic sites along the Nile Valley, dated around 3500 BC. But we can presume from the regrowth of calcite crystals along their engravings, possible under humid conditions, that they could be even older,” said Lucarini.

Farafra’s rock art sites are 600 km from the Red Sea, 400 km from the Mediterranean and 300 km from the Nile.

“The location is another important for another aspect of the find,” said Lucarini.  “Representations of boats in the Egyptian Western Desert are rare in comparison to those in the Eastern Desert, a region which connects the Nile valley with the Red Sea. They could have been created by people who were moving across very long distances and could have visited the sea or the Nile Valley. In the sites we investigated we did not find any faunal remains belonging to giraffe so, like the images of boats, the drawing of the giraffe may represent not a local element but something seen somewhere else and considered exotic.”

Building a picture of the transition
The Archaeological Mission in the Farafra Oasis is building a picture of the transition from foraging societies to communities based on the exploitation of domestic species. Today the Wadi el Obeiyid landscape is arid and characterised by white limestone formations and high sand dunes, but thousands of years ago the region was a savannah-like environment with grasslands offering subsistence to human groups and animals.

“Since 1987, we have had permission from the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities to survey some 10,000 square kilometres of desert. Our starting point in the research is the use of satellite images which enable us to identify past sources of water and therefore where settlements may have been located. We then carry out detailed walking surveys of these areas to try to locate the presence of old seasonal lacustrine basins, shallow pools, around which people used to live,” said Lucarini.

Over the past years Lucarini and team have been studying the remains of Sheikh el Obeiyid village, a slab structure site with stone circles that were once the foundations of huts made with animal skin and vegetation. “We’ve also found tumuli containing corridor structures. They weren’t dwellings, burials or storage spaces. They may have had a religious or symbolic function,” he said.
“In the past archaeologists have tended to see Africa as somehow lagging ‘behind’ Europe and the Near East, but our work shows that people living in the Eastern Sahara had a significant and developed culture – which fed into the development of the Pharaonic civilization and beyond.”
Lucarini is keen to develop training programmes for Egyptian Antiquities inspectors, teachers and school children in order to share the team’s research into the region’s archaeological and environmental significance and underline the importance of preserving the cultural heritage, which is, at present, vulnerable to damage.

It was a couple of days after I visited the mummy store that my nightmares began. Bandaged bodies on shelves. A loose wrapping, perhaps about to uncoil further as the corpse within awoke from its 3,000-year sleep. Most of all, the painted face of a young man gazing untiringly into darkness as the curator turned out the lights behind us and firmly locked the door.
Hidden in the heart of the British Museum, deep within a labyrinth of research departments the public never sees, is a secret world of the dead. This museum, whose collections blossomed in the age of empire when Egypt was under British control, owns more than 100 mummies. Many are on permanent display. Eight were taken to hospital to undergo CT scans for the museum’s revelatory new exhibition Ancient Lives. Others lie here, on wooden pallets, layered one over the other, in London’s most enigmatic morgue.
The room doesn’t need to be especially cold – the mummies were embalmed millennia ago, their brains and organs removed to prevent internal decay – but it does have a carefully regulated temperature that suits the fragile dead. Their casings, too, are organic and need care: linen wrappings, wooden coffins. One of the coffins dates from about 3,000BC – older than the pyramids – and is just a timber crate. Later ones are painted in styles from Old Kingdom to Roman, laden with hieroglyphic spells.
Why are mummies spooky? Why are horror stories told about them and why do Scooby Doo scenarios come to mind when you see them in a museum? I’d love to pretend that I was too interested in proper archaeology to waste time on such stuff, but I really did have nightmares after visiting the mummy store. And they got me thinking about what mummies really are: vehicles of immortality.
It’s amazing that any Egyptian mummies have survived to be preserved in the British Museum. Over the centuries, thousands have been destroyed through superstition and morbid curiosity. In the 18th century, "mummy", the powdered flesh and bone of the ancient Egyptian dead, was swallowed as medicine. Even when a growing fascination with Egypt made this seem wasteful, things got little better, for public unwrappings of mummies became all the rage. Invaluable archaeological evidence was destroyed for cheap thrills.
Then the horror stories began. The 19th-century writers Theophile Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker all wrote eerie tales about mummies, but it was Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who hit on the perfect formula of the revived mummy in his story Lot 249. Soon the 1932 Boris Karloff classic The Mummy launched the pharaonic dead on their fantastic film career.
Is all this a depressing insight into our vulgar souls and inability to be interested in the remote past unless it is turned into cheap fiction? No. The gothic imagination feasts on mummies for a good reason. They are genuinely uncanny: the closest that humanity has come to conquering death.
Ancient Egyptians wanted to live for ever. Almost all the Egyptian art and artefacts in museums are part of an effort to achieve this. False doors from tombs – the British Museum has a majestic one painted red that resembles a massive stone Mark Rothko painting – are portals through which the ka, or spirit double, of the deceased person could come to receive food offerings. The models of people brewing beer that were put in tombs were intended to provide actual beer for the living dead.
Everything important in a tomb, from small sculpted servants to the mummy itself, was touched with an adze by a priest in a ritual called "the opening of the mouth". This rite gave magical potency to everything the ka would need in the next life – and its needs included the mummified corpse. The reason for perfectly preserving the corpse was so that its ka could recognise it, and so connect with it to enjoy the food and drink the mummy digested on its behalf.
Spirit and body were mysteriously connected. It’s not that Egyptians believed that the mummy could get up and chase people round museums – but they did believe that the dead person’s spiritual ka form, which needed the mummy to exist, could leave the tomb and walk around. There are statues of it doing just that.
So what? People believe all kinds of things. But the ancient Egyptians believed in their conquest of death for at least 3,000 years and repeated their spells and rituals over and over again. Their art is incredibly powerful because it is full of the confidence and faith of those rituals. It is truly magical art. Looking at the painted caskets in the mummy store I am moved by the conviction they communicate that death is not the end, but only the beginning of a strange adventure.
The door closes. The eternal night of the tomb returns. The young man’s painted face looks calmly into the eyes of his ka.

Archaeologists say remains of a rare, circular 1850s prison block unearthed at the former Pentridge Prison is of world significance in penal history.

The public will next month be able to view the extraordinary bluestone foundations of the panopticon, shaped like a Trivial Pursuit token, which experts say is one of the few examples of its type to survive.

It was part of a brutal 19th-century movement to keep prisoners in solitary contemplation, under total surveillance.


Pentridge had three: this one, next to A Division on the north of the site is the first to be unearthed. Later in May, excavation will start on two more next to B Division to the south.
Archaeologist and ABC TV host Adam Ford said a teenage Ned Kelly, when at Pentridge for three years in the early 1870s, would have spent time in at least one of them. ‘‘He went in to Pentridge a 16-year-old as a ratbag and came out as a hardened criminal with a big chip on his shoulder.’’
In A Division, new prisoners spent 23 hours alone in their tiny cells, and for the remaining hour were each marched, with caps over their eyes, into the adjacent, one-man, wedge shaped panopticon ‘‘airing yard’’.
Guards watching from a central tower knew prisoners by number. The yard had no roof, and inmates were expected to stay silent and study the Bible.
The method was ditched by the early 1900s as prisoner numbers and therefore cell sharing increased.
After its demolition in the 1950s, the ruins were buried under a yard by the time Pentridge closed in 1997.
The Taiwanese based company Shayher Group, which owns 6.76 hectares of the former prison, has employed Mr Ford’s consultancy Dig International to excavate five areas of archaeological importance as a Heritage Victoria condition of a massive housing and commercial development.
Using an excavator and then mattocks and pickaxes, the archaeologists took 10 days to expose the panopticon footings.
Mr Ford said the results exceeded all expectations. ‘‘We’ve all been completely blown away by it.’’
‘‘It’s ‘wow’ archaeology, because it gets that response – when people come around that corner they see it and it’s very striking.
‘‘We’d done some test excavations; we know stuff was here, but had no idea of its integrity and the extent and also the grandeur of the remains.
‘‘So it really wasn’t until we stood back, panting a bit after we’d finshed excavating, that we looked at it and went, ‘good grief, this is amazing’.’’
Mr Ford believes it is ‘‘the most intact foundation of this panopticon-style building anywhere in the world’’.
‘‘It will be a long time, if ever, that I get to excavate anything as special as this site.’’
He said about six prisons around the world adopted this circular style from a late 1700s idea by prison reformer Jeremy Bentham, and fewer than 12 of them were built, including at Pentonville in Britain, in Port Arthur in Tasmania, and the Old Melbourne Gaol, but little remained of most of them.
Heritage Victoria senior archaeologist Jeremy Smith, who has worked on many Victorian digs including the discovery of the remains of 35 executed inmates, including Ned Kelly at Pentridge in 2009, said the Pentridge panopticons ‘‘are rare on a world scale’’. ‘‘They give us a worldwide perspective of a different approach to the management of prisoners, particularly the deprivation of identity.’’
The dig team, which includes students from Melbourne and La Trobe universities, is now unearthing the foundations of 360 tiny cells that were part of nearby C Division.
The two-storey, 1859 bluestone C Division was condemned in the 1880s as unfit for habitation, but continued operations until its demolition in the early 1970s.
Shayher spokesman Robert Larocca, said the future of the panopticon and other finds was yet to be determined.
Dig updates will be posted from Friday, May 9 at historicpentridge.com.au. Later this month the website will post details of free public tours of the site to be held in late June.

The wreck of the ‘Santa Maria’, as envisaged in 1492 Shipwreck found off coast of Haiti thought to be one of the most significant underwater discoveries in history

More than five centuries after Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked in the Caribbean, archaeological investigators think they may have discovered the vessel’s long-lost remains – lying at the bottom of the sea off the north coast of Haiti. It’s likely to be one of the world’s most important underwater archaeological discoveries.

Fatehpur Sikri (1986), Uttar Pradesh

Sikri an extension of the upper Vindhyan ranges is situated on the bank of a large natural lake, which has now mostly dried up. It is a pre-historic site and, with abundant water, forest and raw material, it was ideal for primitive man’s habitation. Rock shelters with paintings exist on the periphery of the lake. Stone age tools have been found in this area. Ochre Coloured Pottery (c. 2nd millennium B.C.) and Painted Grey Ware (c.1200-800 B.C.) have also been discovered from here.


Sikri has been mentioned in the Mahabharata as ‘Saik’. Lexicons define ‘Saik’ as a region surrounded by water. An inscription found on the stone sculpture of Jaina Saraswati (dated 1067 Vikram Samvat = 1010 A.D.) mentions this place as ‘Sekrikya’, which seems to be a similar derivative. All this shows that Sikri was continuously inhabited since the prehistoric period.


Babur visited the place on the eve of the Khanwah battle in A.D. 1527 and mentioned it as ‘Sikri’ in his Memoirs. He founded here a garden and a Jal-Mahal surrounded by the lake-water, and a baoli (step-well) to commemorate his victory in the Khanwah battle.

Akbar (1556-1605), grandson of Babur, shifted his residence and court from Agra to Sikri, for a period of 13 years, from 1572 to 1585 to honour the Sufi Saint Sheikh Salim Chishti, who resided here (in a cavern on the ridge). Akbar revered him very much as the Saint had blessed him with a son who was named Salim in 1569. He raised lofty buildings for his use, and houses for the public. Thus grew, a great city with charming palaces and institutions. Akbar gave it the name of Fathabad and which in later days came to be known as “Fathpur Sikri”.


Here practically, all Mughal institutions such as the ‘Ibadat-Khanah’, ‘Din-i-Ilahi’, ‘Tarikh-i-Ilahi’ , Jharokha-Darshan, the doctrine of Sulh-i-Kul and policy of liberal patronage to indigenous arts and literatures, were founded. It was also here that workshops of various handicrafts were established.

Sikri was the first planned city of the Mughals. The sloping levels of the city were connected into terraces which were utilised for various complexes such as Jami masjid, Buland-Darwazah and tomb of Sheikh Salim Chishti; Khass Mahal, Shahi-Bazar, Mina-Bazar, the Panch-Mahal, Khwabgah, Diwan-i-Khass, Anup-Talao, Chaupar and Diwan-i-Am. The efficient system of drainage and water-supply adopted here suggest an extremely intelligent town-planning by the Mughal emperor.

All these palaces were built of red sandstone in the trabeate beam-and-post order, and composed of pillars, ornamental arches, brackets-and-chhajjas, jharokhas, chhatris, chhaparkhats, chaukhandis and so on. Domes have been used sparingly. Sometimes corbelled pendentives have been employed in the transition phase.

The architecture of Fatehpur Sikri has a definite all-India character. It is prolific and versatile Indo-Muslim composite style, which is a fussion of the composite cultures of indigenous and foreign origins


Open from sunrise to sunset

Entrance Fee:

Citizens of India and visitors of SAARC (Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Maldives and Afghanistan) and BIMSTEC Countries (Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar) - Rs. 10 per head.

Others:
US $ 5 or Indian Rs. 250/- per head (ASI);
Rs. 10/- per head (ADA)

Rs. 500/- ticket of ADA purchased at Taj Mahal is valid for the monuments of Agra Fort, Itimadi-ud-daula, Akbar’s Tomb, Sikandara and Fatehpur Sikri

(children up to 15 years free)

The museum was established in 1982 in the ground floor in western Naubat Khana, also known as Jal Mahal, with in the Taj Mahal complex. It is a double storied building having a quadrangle projection outside and is built on a raised platform.

The museum comprises of three galleries in addition to the main hall and has on display various exhibits relating mostly to the construction of the Taj Mahal and to the period of its builders. Totally 121 antiquities are on display, which are broadly categorized as Mughal miniature paintings, manuscripts, government decrees, specimen of calligraphy, arms, utensils, plans and drawings of Taj Complex, paintings, specimen inlay work, marble pillars, etc.

In main hall the paintings of Shah Jahan and his most favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal both on ivory, encased in ornamental wooden frame, replicas of coins minted Akbarabad (Agra) are on display.

Paintings from the famous Persian epic Shahnama of Firdausi, an interesting manuscript of Chaihl Majlis dated to 1612 AD bearing the signature of Shah Jahan under the royal seal dated 4th February 1628 and other are displayed in this gallery.

The first gallery contains plans and colour drawings showing the salient features of the architecture of Tai Mahal. The most worthwhile is a site plan, front elevation of the tomb and other details are recorded on this site plan. Copies of Shah Jahan’s farmans dated AH 1042 (August 1632) addressed to Raja Jai Singh and another farman dated 20th June 1637 addressed to Raja Jai Singh of Jaipur to ensure regular supply of the makrana marble, etc. required in the construction of the imperial building, Taj Mahal are also exhibited in the gallery.

The second gallery display some jade and porcelain objects like Quaran stand carved of Jade, a beautiful ornamented spouted vase (lota) carve of Jade, mirror mounted on stone, bowl and dishes of Celadon ware. Arms like swords, daggers and a world map showing the places from where stones were imported for inlay work of Taj Mahal along with specimens of these semiprecious stones are also in display.

In third gallery important royal farmans and documents, Waslis (specimen) of famous calligraphy of the period, two paintings of Taj Mahal by British artist Daniel in the year 1795 AD are displayed. An interesting order of General Perron of the period of Shah Alam II recording the details of the auction of fruits in the garden of the mausoleum of Taj ganj is also displayed. The royal farmans of Shah Jahan about registering a grant of land in various villages and confirming a grant of hereditary land to Shaikh Hatim is also find placed in the gallery.


Opening Hours : 10.00 am to 5.00 pm
Closed on – Friday


Entrance Fee :
Rs. 25/- per head
(Children up to 15 years free)

While the advances in technology and manufacturing that took place in Britain during  the 18th and 19th centuries have entered the mainstream of history, few know about the industrialisation carried out during the Roman occupation, says Simon Elliott.


The phrase ‘Industrial Revolution’ plays such a central role in the narrative of British history that few historians have asked whether the British Isles experienced anything similar prior to its advent in the 18th century. It seems, however, that Britain did experience a form of industrial revolution, from the later first century through to the the end of the fourth, the period of the Roman occupation. During this time, parts of the British Isles, especially in the south and the east, developed a wide variety of industries, which, like those of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, were large in scale, were marked by engineering innovation and involved complex manufacturing processes. These industries became incorporated into a sophisticated international economic system, supported by an advanced maritime and land-based transport infrastructure. This revolution played a major role in shaping the nature of society throughout the period of the Roman occupation.

While there is no question that the economy of the Roman Empire as a whole remained overwhelmingly agrarian, industry played an important role, a fact still evident today in the high levels of pollutants that remain from Roman industrial activity (such as lead and copper emissions), which can be traced in the Greenland ice cores. Using ice-core copper pollution as an example, it appears that the only other major period of substantial industrial output anywhere in the world between the Roman Empire and the modern Industrial Revolution occured during the 11th century, in Sung dynasty China. The scale of industry that developed in Britain during the Roman occupation was certainly revolutionary compared with what had existed before, during the later Iron Age. It was also extraordinary in comparison with what came later.

The economy of the Roman Empire featured large-scale state-controlled mining (metalla) and quarrying enterprises, as well as manufactories producing a wide variety of products, including: weapons of uniform quality and size; fine Samian ware pottery; textiles; milling and other food production enterprises, not least the ubiquitous garum fish sauce, beloved throughout the Empire. Such a suite of industries also became a major feature of the British experience of Romanitas. Examples include the huge iron producing enterprises (initially in the Weald of Sussex, Surrey and Kent and later in the Forest of Dean and the East Midlands); industrial-scale quarrying to serve the urbanisation and later fortification of Britain (a demand fulfilled by a thriving construction sector); tile and brick production; mining of all kinds; a huge number of pottery kilns; mosaic and glass production; salt production; and, possibly, the manufacture of garum. Meanwhile the production of quern stones flourished, along with the milling industry to which it was central, while Britain was also home to a thriving textile industry. The latter was highly regarded throughout the empire for two textile products: a form of the birrus hooded cloak and a fine quality tapetia rug.

A coin-minting industry also developed, revealing of the political and economic progress made in the province during the occupation. There were more coins minted and circulated in Britain during the occupation than ever before. The principal official mint was in London, where coins were produced between AD 286-324 and 383-388. Of the 29 major mints from across the empire represented in the British Portable Antiquities Scheme database, the 2,987 coins made in London represent the fifth largest category, an impressive statistic as it is surpassed only by the output of the major urban centres of Rome itself, Trier, Arles and Lyon.

To look at a specific regional example of Roman industrialisation in Britain, the south-east featured a range of enterprises, largely based on the extractive industries. These sat broadly within three economic zones of activity. The first was around the river valleys of the Darent, a tributary of the Thames, and (principally) the Medway, both of which were within the economic sphere of London. A second was in a zone running down the east Kent coast from Dover to Lympne (in the economic sphere of Canterbury and the imperial gateway at Richborough). The third was in the Weald of Kent, Sussex and Surrey.

While the Darent Valley was notable for the large villa estates constructed for Roman London’s political and economic elites, the luxurious villas constructed along the Medway valley belonged in the main to those who managed a vast and flourishing industrial landscape based around extensive ragstone quarries above the tidal reach at Allington. This industry was facilitated by a complex river infrastructure in the form of locks and weirs, which made the Medway navigable to the ships and barges that carried the enormous quantities of ragstone into the Thames Estuary and beyond.

From there the ragstone was shipped around the south-east, as far afield as Colchester (where it was used in the construction of the town’s Claudian temple and the gates of the Circus) and Bradwell (later a Saxon shore fort) to the north, London to the west and Richborough (where it was used in the monumental arch and its superseding Saxon shore fort) to the east. The scale of this industrial activity has led scholars to consider the possibility that the Roman state was directly involved, at least during the earlier years of the occupation. The excavation in the early 1960s of the 14 metre-long merchant ship Blackfriars 1 has shed light on this process. This vessel, dated to the early second century, was found by Blackfriars Bridge on the western edge of the City of London, just where the River Fleet would have entered the Thames. Crucially, it foundered while carrying 26 tonnes of Kentish ragstone from the Medway valley quarries, still in its hold when it was discovered some 1,800 years later.

While there is evidence that other materials were quarried in the Medway valley during the occupation – for example, the sand and chalk for which the industry is better known in the modern era – it is the ragstone quarrying which has left its unmistakable mark to this day on the Roman south-east. Ragstone is a grey-green, sandy and glauconitic limestone found within the Hythe Beds of the Lower Greensand geological formation near Folkestone. It was highly valued by the Romans for its durability and the comparative ease with which it could be worked and is a common feature of many of the region’s buildings and monuments. A primary example is the late second-century Roman land walls of London, over three kilometres long, whose fine quality facing blocks are still visible in surviving sections, such as those near Tower Hill underground station. This enterprise alone is a remarkable example of the demand for the material, with modern estimates indicating that over one million squared and dressed ragstone blocks would have been required for the inner and outer facing, together with a rubble ragstone core, which was then set with mortar. A similar vessel to Blackfriars 1 would have needed to have made around 1,750 voyages of 56km each way to transport the 45,000 tonnes of ragstone required for such a massive building programme.

The quarries needed to supply this monumental demand were of a matching scale. While ragstone outcrops are found in the Hythe Beds, the finest quality material lies within the outcrops in the upper Medway valley and these were heavily exploited during the occupation. There are four likely sites for the quarries: at Allington (actually on the tidal reach), Boughton Monchelsea to the south of modern Maidstone, Dean Street (also south of Maidstone and, at 2.5km long, one of the largest man-made features of occupied Britain) and finally at Teston, slightly further upriver. Each of these sites had direct access either to the Medway itself or, in the case of Boughton Monchelsea, to a major tributary, the Loose Stream, notable for its mills. The luxury villas of the associated elite were located in Maidstone, East Farleigh, Barming and Teston, all within easy reach of the quarries. A Roman road ran from the Dean Street quarry to the Roman ford at Barming and to a nearby villa at East Farleigh.

East Wear Bay, at Folkestone, was well known for its quern stone industry, which manufactured high quality Greensand querns from the outcropping in the local cliffs. The success of the industry is evident from the widespread export of the querns made there, examples being found as far afield as Hunsbury in Northamptonshire and possibly in northern France. This particular Greensand was noted for its strength, a quality critical to the quern stone’s grinding power and resistance to wear. It also allowed industrial-sized millstones to be manufactured, for use at high-volume regional water mills, such as that on the River Stour at Ickham, Kent. The archaeological record suggests that the quern stone industry in Folkestone preceded the arrival of the Romans, with evidence of its origins in the later Iron Age. However it is clear that the beginning of the occupation marked a dramatic increase in the scale of such activities and in the ability to transport the manufactured goods to new markets, a hallmark, too, of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Meanwhile other building stone was quarried locally, as the region began its path to Roman urbanisation and fortification. Tufa (volcanic rock), was quarried extensively in the valley of the River Dour above Folkestone. Blocks of the material are found in the walls of the forts of the Classis Britannica, the Roman fleet based in Britain, and also in later Saxon shore forts at Dover and Lympne, the pharos at Dover, settlement buildings in the same town and in the large villa at East Wear Bay. Chalk was also quarried extensively, as was flint. Again, both were used as building materials, while a large ragstone quarry has been located above the Saxon shore fort at Lympne, which supplied the stone for its construction.

Further west the Weald reveals the extensive industrial landscape renowned for iron manufacturing during the occupation. This industry, too, had its origins in the later Iron Age, at sites such as Garden Hill in East Sussex. However it is with the arrival of the Romans that large-scale activity began, especially near the coast of the eastern Weald. Intensive sites such as Beauport Park, Footlands and Oaklands Park began processing huge quantities of locally mined iron ore to produce high quality iron, which was exported around the region and abroad from ports such as Bodiam on the River Rother and Castle Croft on the River Wallers Haven. These major sites were also linked to the Medway valley by the Roman Road that travelled north from Beauport Park, past Footlands and Oaklands Park, through modern Maidstone and then on to Roman Rochester.

Using a ‘direct process’ method, which combined smelting and forging in one procedure, some of the furnaces used during the occupation were larger than any in use again until the coming of the Industrial Revolution proper. Recent estimates indicate that during the 200 years when the Romano-British Wealden iron industry was at its height, based on the current estimate of 100,000 tonnes of slag in the region, the industry produced up to 30,000 tonnes of iron at 113 known sites. The four largest sites produced 44 per cent of the total of this waste volume and were thus by far the largest contributors to overall iron production. The Beauport Park site produced 210 tonnes of iron annually from the first to the third centuries AD.

There was an extensive brick and tile manufacturing industry in the Weald, which made use of the fine quality clays abundant in the region. The industry is heavily associated with the tiles stamped ‘CLBR’, indicating a building belonging to the Classis Britannica, which are found across the region and have been discovered as far afield as Boulogne. The Grey Wealden shale quarried to make finely cut tiles is regularly found within the boundaries of what was Roman London in the form of Opus Sectile tiled floors, a style of illustrative, mosaic-like decoration.

Patterns common to all three of these significant industries are discernible. Kentish ragstone is known to have been used in the first Roman forum in London, built during the AD 50s. It is also found in the Claudian temple in Colchester, constructed sometime before the Boudiccan revolt of AD 43. Meanwhile at least nine of the iron-making sites in the Weald were fully operational by the end of the first century AD, indicating the early beginnings of industry. Although iron manufacturing existed to a limited extent in the Weald before the occupation, there was certainly no ragstone quarrying taking place. It, therefore, seems likely that the Romans had some knowledge before their official arrival of the available resources in the south-east and of their potential for industrial-scale exploitation.

There is a clear chronological distinction between the period of large-scale industry typical of the middle of the third century and the more localised activity which marks the period immediately before the end of the Roman occupation. The use of Kentish ragstone on a grand scale declined during the third century (the later river wall and bastions of London are made of recycled material from public buildings and mausolea rather than the fine ragstone of the earlier land wall). Meanwhile, iron manufacturing in the Weald had also ceased by this time. The Classis Britannica in its earlier, large-scale phase, acting on the authority of the Procurator (the official in charge of a province’s financial affairs), had facilitated the opening up of industrial activity on a large scale, with the emphasis on making the new province pay its way. Across the empire the regional merchant navies had a strong association with the extractive industries (including the Classis Germanica on the River Rhine) and this was certainly the case in the Weald, where many of the larger iron manufacturing sites that have been excavated feature considerable numbers of local CLBR-stamped tiles. The Classis Britannica played a similarly crucial role with the Medway valley’s ragstone quarrying industry, given the need to manage what was a vast business enterprise, including the maritime transport necessary to carry the stone and the building and management of the river infrastructure required. Even the quern industry at East Wear Bay has a Classis Britannica link, evidenced by the plentiful CLBR-stamped tiles found locally (including at the Folkestone villa).

But the Classis Britannica disappears from history in the middle of the third century, its last reference being in an epigraphic testament to one Saturninus, ex-captain in the fleet, dated to no later than AD 249. It is at this time that major changes take place in the three zones, for example, the decline of industrial-scale ragstone quarrying and iron manufacturing described above, as well as in settlement patterns. It is in this context that industrial activity becomes much more localised. This transformation is paralleled by other changes in Britain, for example, in settlement patterns. It is a matter of debate whether such changes from large-scale state-run activity and associated settlement to localism was regionally specific or simply a symptom of the maturing imperial project during a century when huge changes were taking place amid the crisis of the third century, which culminated in the Diocletianic Persecution of Christians throughout the Roman Empire in the late third and early fourth centuries, ending in 313 with the Edict of Milan, passed by Constantine and Licinius.

There were clearly differences between the arrival of industry into Britain during the occupation and the ascendency of industry over agriculture during the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. Britain’s census of 1851 shows that over half of the economically active population were for the first time employed in industry (determined as manufacturing, mining and construction). One simply cannot say that the Classical economy was dominated by industry, because it was not, though it did play an important role. In that regard, three questions arise: was there a pronounced increase in the scale of industry in Britain with the advent of the occupation? Was there a pronounced increase in the level of engineering innovation at the same time? Could one describe some of the industry as manufacturing? The answer to all three questions is yes. The increase in scale of the industries, such as quarrying and iron manufacturing, was enormous. Further, consider the impact that the 18th-century Industrial Revolution had on the economy and on society and ask if this was replicated earlier, during the Roman occupation. While long-range trading networks have been a feature of human economic activity since the Neolithic period or earlier, nothing had existed in Britain before the Roman occupation to compare with the international economy within which it suddenly found itself. Society in Britain dramatically changed with the advent of the occupation and manpower-intensive industries such as quarrying and iron manufacturing had a major social impact in the regions where they were prominent. Both the Britain of the Roman occupation and that of the Industrial Revolution experienced substantial population growth. In the Roman period this peaked at up to four million, an increase from no higher than two million in the later Iron Age. There is evidence that parts of the country experienced a population crash towards the end of the Iron Age, indicating that pre-Roman population levels were not sustainable. The rapid population growth that followed the occupation is evident in the new towns and cities, the civitas capitals, municipa, coloniae and small towns replacing the far fewer oppida (defensive settlements) which had existed before. While Roman population growth can seem insignificant compared with that associated with the later Industrial Revolution, it is important to acknowledge the scale and rate of change in comparison with what had existed before. For all these reasons one can argue that the arrival of the Romans in Britain marked the onset of an Industrial Revolution which would not be replicated nor surpassed until the 18th century.