Archaeology Excavation

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.

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.’

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.

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.