iron age

The new version of a slab from the Kivik cairn. Fornvännen 2015:1 is now on-line on Open Access. Sven Sandström on fake Paleolithic art in France. Andreas Toreld and Tommy Andersson on sensational new discoveries on the carved slabs of the Kivik burial cairn. They've been endlessly discussed for over 200 years, and now the whole game just changes. Birgit Maixner on a new Late 1st Millennium elite site at Missingen/Åkeberg in Norway. Inger Jans et al. on the last users of runes in the unbroken tradition from the Iron Age on – around 1910! Anders Söderberg on one of these lovely little…

On 10 June I blogged about some grisly finds from Cliffs End in Kent which to my mind indicate eight centuries of human sacrifice during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. I invited colleagues at Wessex Archaeology who did the dig to comment, and Chief Osteoarcheologist Jacqueline McKinley kindly sent me some detailed views. The first thing to note is that though the full monograph hasn't appeared yet and my blog entry was based on a pop-sci feature in British Archaeology, a scholarly paper on the site has in fact been published: McKinley, Schuster, & Millard 2013. Dead-sea connections: a…

British Archaeology #131 (July/August) has a feature by Pippa Bradley that caught my interest. It's about a Wessex Archaeology dig in 2004-05 at Cliffs End farm in Thanet, a piece of north-east Kent that was an island up until the 16th century when silting finished connecting it to mainland England. What we're dealing with here is ritual murder, some pretty strange disposal of the dead and ancient Scandinavian migrants. Use of the site begins in earnest with six ring-ditch barrows during the Early Bronze Age (2200-1500 cal BC). These were poorly preserved and yielded few interesting finds.…