A rich cornucopia of exciting discoveries awaits you in this latest issue of Current Archaeology.
To start off, what did an Anglo Saxon Cemetery really look like? At the American Airforce Base at Lakenheath in Suffolk,
they nobly decided to sacrifice baseball pitch number 1 in favour of more dormitory accommodation. Little did they know that under the baseball pitch, 261 dead Anglo-Saxons were lurking, one of them with his horse – in one of the most remarkable burials recently found in Anglo-Saxon archaeology.
‘By South Cadbury is that Camelot’ wrote Leland in the 16th century and from 1967-1971 Leslie Alcock, in a classic series of excavations, demonstrated that this great Iron Age hillfort was refortified in the 5th and 6th centuries, the so called Arthurian period. But how fared the common folk outside the hillfort? A recent project has surveyed the environs and discovered a very uncommon object indeed, a bronze shield. What strange rituals were going on?
English Heritage has recently paid £850,000 to acquire a field on the outskirts of Swindon. What did they get for their money and is there any truth in their suggestion that the Romans sensible people – drove on the left?
At St Aidan’s, near Pontefract, boats are currently being excavated in a coal mine. The mine is an open-cast one digging away the old bed of the River Aire, but discoveries so far range from a medieval mill, a number of eighteenth-century ships and the lock that eventually bypassed the mill dam.
What is Aves Ditch? Aves Ditch is a bank and ditch that runs for four miles dead straight across North Oxfordshire. The Oxford University Archaeology Society have been investigating (and incidently have found yet another skeleton).
Finally what do St Hilda and Dracula have in common? English Heritage are currently launching a major conservation project at the great monastery of Whitby and here we look at the design of the project and the rather strange garden that was the result of the first excavation.