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Having lived in the countryside for more than two decades and fallen for its charms, I find myself fascinated by its heritage. Rural history is often overlooked for the grand stories of royalty, urban life, and warfare. For me, the archaeology and history that speaks of daily life, practical struggles, and the humanity of people–that’s what really switches me on. I constantly yearn to get inside the minds of our ancestors to try and understand how they saw the world. Whether that’s strange superstitions or ingenious inventions, it’s all part of what it means to be human.
When we first moved to our farm, we discovered witches’ marks carved into the walls of our granary. Hundreds of years old, these ancient scribblings are absolutely everywhere–churches, grand homes, cottages, and farm buildings. These are not mindless doodles, however, but prayers for a good harvest or desperate protections against harm.
Matthew Champion’s well-researched book is a highly readable summary of this secretive and surprisingly common practice.
For centuries carved writings and artworks in churches lay largely unnoticed. So archaeologist Matthew Champion started a nationwide survey to gather the best examples. In this book he shines a spotlight on a forgotten world of ships, prayers for good fortune, satirical cartoons, charms, curses, windmills, word puzzles, architectural plans and heraldic designs. Drawing on examples from surviving medieval churches in England, the author gives a voice to the secret graffiti artists: from the lord of the manor and the parish priest to the people who built the church itself.
Here are strange medieval beasts, knights battling unseen dragons, ships…
Having lived in the countryside for more than two decades and fallen for its charms, I find myself fascinated by its heritage. Rural history is often overlooked for the grand stories of royalty, urban life, and warfare. For me, the archaeology and history that speaks of daily life, practical struggles, and the humanity of people–that’s what really switches me on. I constantly yearn to get inside the minds of our ancestors to try and understand how they saw the world. Whether that’s strange superstitions or ingenious inventions, it’s all part of what it means to be human.
As an archaeology undergraduate at Oxford University, I was always drawn to the murkier side of human history.
There, I came across the subject of bog bodies, unfortunate people who were sacrificed and thrown into peat bogs across northern Europe thousands of years ago. Plenty has been written about the topic, but Miranda Aldhouse-Green’s sharp-eyed offering pulls together the latest research and scientific breakthroughs.
It is time for a new book about bog bodies: the number of known bodies is growing. Lindow Man, the famous 'Pete Marsh' discovered in Cheshire in the 1980s, has been joined by new finds from Ireland and elsewhere. Who were these unfortunate people, and why were they killed? Archaeologists, armed with the latest analytical techniques, are today investigating these cold cases to reveal much about our distant past. Forensic science allows us to deduce the age, physical condition, status, cause and time of death of these ancient victims, helping to answer the fundamental questions that they pose: were these…
Having lived in the countryside for more than two decades and fallen for its charms, I find myself fascinated by its heritage. Rural history is often overlooked for the grand stories of royalty, urban life, and warfare. For me, the archaeology and history that speaks of daily life, practical struggles, and the humanity of people–that’s what really switches me on. I constantly yearn to get inside the minds of our ancestors to try and understand how they saw the world. Whether that’s strange superstitions or ingenious inventions, it’s all part of what it means to be human.
For a rational, well-educated woman, I’m also occasionally superstitious. This gripping compilation of folk beliefs and rural ritual–from two stalwarts of folklore academia–is a book I return to again and again.
Almost every aspect of rural life has a superstition attached. From churning butter to childbirth, I pour over these weird and wonderful subjects and am reminded of just how pervasive and persuasive folk beliefs still are.
Are there any legends about cats? Is Cinderella an English story? What is a Mumming Play? The subject of folklore covers an extremely wide field, with connections to virtually every aspect of life. It ranges from the bizarre to the seemingly mundane. Similarly, folklore is as much a feature of the modern technological age as the ancient world, of every part of the country, both urban and rural, and of every age group and occupation. Containing 1,250 entries, from dragons to Mother Goose, May Day to Michaelmas, this reference work is an absorbing and entertaining guide to English folklore. Aimed…
Having lived in the countryside for more than two decades and fallen for its charms, I find myself fascinated by its heritage. Rural history is often overlooked for the grand stories of royalty, urban life, and warfare. For me, the archaeology and history that speaks of daily life, practical struggles, and the humanity of people–that’s what really switches me on. I constantly yearn to get inside the minds of our ancestors to try and understand how they saw the world. Whether that’s strange superstitions or ingenious inventions, it’s all part of what it means to be human.
In 2018, I visited one of the most unusual exhibitions I’d ever been to. Hosted by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, ‘Spellbound’ examined how magical thinking has been practiced over the centuries.
From mummified cats to lovers’ rings, the displays were dazzling. Every time I open the accompanying book, with its remarkable photographs and illustrations, I’m transported back to this extraordinary, baffling world.
Do you believe in magic? Even if you don't, you probably 'think magically' sometimes. We touch wood to stop bad things happening, or take a lucky object to a job interview or exam in an irrational attempt to influence the outcome. Spellbound: Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft was the first exhibition to examine how magical thinking has been practised over the centuries. With exquisitely engraved rings to bind a lover, enchanted animal hearts pierced with nails, mummified cats concealed in walls and many other intriguing objects, the exhibition catalogue shows that the use of magic is driven by our strongest emotions:…
It seems I was destined to write about textiles. Long after I started documenting the tapestries of the Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh—over 45 years ago—I discovered that my great-grandfather was a cotton mule-spinner, working one of those machines that spurred on the industrial revolution. So it’s in my blood. I’ve interviewed dozens of people who’ve made similar discoveries, and have become a firm believer in the long-lasting inherited significance of textiles. We’ve made them and they in turn have made us who we are. Now more than ever, my hope is to entangle people into the wonderful web that connects every era and every culture.
This excellent introduction to the latest archaeological textile studies should convince you that this is the most exciting field for new interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the past. There are 23 essays discussing finds from 16 counties, each telling intelligent but accessible stories about social, chronological, and cultural aspects of ancient societies. Well illustrated and with lots of further reading listed, you’ll end up wanting more.
There is evidence that ever since early prehistory, textiles have always had more than simply a utilitarian function. Textiles express who we are - our gender, age, family affiliation, occupation, religion, ethnicity and social, political, economic and legal status. Besides expressing our identity, textiles protect us from the harsh conditions of the environment, whether as clothes or shelter. We use them at birth for swaddling, in illness as bandages and at death as shrouds. We use them to carry and contain people and things. We use them for subsistence to catch fish and animals and for transport as sails. In…
Tim Murray has been a leading exponent of the history and philosophy of archaeology for the past thirty years. He has used the history of the discipline to explore the nature of archaeological theory and the many complex intersections between archaeology and society. Of his many publications flowing from this general project, the award-winning global scale five-volume Encyclopedia of Archaeology,the single volume global history of Archaeology Milestones in Archaeology. Murray is a global leader in applying studies in the history of archaeology to the reform of archaeological theory. This is evidenced by the publication of a collection of his essays, From Antiquarian to Archaeologist, and his numerous academic papers on the subject.
The Discovery of the Past is an intellectualtour de forcefocused on explaining how the modern practice of archaeology came to be.
The book has a particular strength in charting the origins and growth of archaeology in Europe and the consequences of its application to the exploration of remote human history around the world.
I've been fond of the Homeric poems since my youth. I followed classical studies in the high here in Rome, so I studied Latin and Greek before graduating in nuclear engineering. Then, in addition to my professional activity, I've devoted myself to the study of The Iliad and the Odyssey, with their huge contradictions between geography and their traditional Mediterranean setting. The book I published on this topic was translated and published into eight foreign languages (as The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales), and has given rise to many scientific discussions. I also published The Mysteries of the Megalithic Civilization, a Bestseller here in Italy.
In this book, an important 20th-century archaeologist reconstructs the life of prehistoric populations in the second millennium BC. Therefore, for those who are interested in this subject, it represents an important tool to better deepen a historical period whose knowledge is currently undergoing great evolution and which in the future could give us many surprises.
As an author of 50+ books of historical fiction and non-fiction for kids, teens, and adults I am handicapped by being unable to travel in time or go to the places I set my stories. I have long used photography as an attempt to capture a sense of places and the people who inhabit them, but I gradually realized that my images were not simply an adjunct to the stories I was telling but that the best of them had their own tales to tell. Through photographs, jumbled piles of stone became a gateway to a lost, magical past and a trigger for my imagination.
For me, poetry from Chaucer to Seamus Heaney can trigger an emotional reaction in the same way that a well-chosen image can.
So, it is natural that photographs and poems of the natural world should be paired. The depths that each adds to the other can hold me in thrall for hours as I delve back and forth and draw out every last emotion.
When at 13, I declared that I’d become an Egyptologist, quite a lot of people thought it would pass. Fast forward 10 years, and I was starting a PhD on Egyptian mummies in museums – it did not pass. I journeyed from the Louvre where I was a gallery attendant trying to uncover the story of bodies buried in their garden, to England where I relocated with little English to pursue an Egyptology degree… and then two more! The ethics of human remains in museums is a complex topic: that’s why I like to make it more approachable to the public, from running my project Mummy Stories, to giving talks in pubs!
This was the first book to introduce me to the relation between race studies, eugenics, and archaeology.
It was quite a revelation: I was volunteering at the Petrie Museum at the time, and the book uncovers the dodgy relationship between Petrie and Francis Galton.
It was pivotal in transforming the ways I looked at familiar places: it reminded me that places I called home, like the Petrie Museum but also the Louvre, have been very exclusionary to many. It taught me to look differently at places I navigate on a regular basis, to look for the otherstory.
You’ll then have to listen to the Bricks + Mortals podcast on the history of UCL buildings, and your wanders in Bloomsbury won’t be the same again.
How much was archaeology founded on prejudice? The Archaeology of Race explores the application of racial theory to interpret the past in Britain during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. It investigates how material culture from ancient Egypt and Greece was used to validate the construction of racial hierarchies. Specifically focusing on Francis Galton's ideas around inheritance and race, it explores how the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie applied these in his work in Egypt and in his political beliefs. It examines the professional networks formed by societies, such as the Anthropological Institute, and their widespread use of eugenic ideas in analysing…
Observant of the world around me, and intellectual, I discovered my ideal way of life at age 16 when I read Kroeber's massive textbook Anthropology, 1948 edition. Anthropologists study everything human, everywhere and all time. Archaeology particularly appealed to me because it is outdoors, physical, plus its data are only the residue of human activities, challenging us to figure out what those people, that place and time, did and maybe thought. As a woman from before the Civil Rights Act, a career was discouraged; instead, I did fieldwork with my husband, and on my own, worked with First Nations communities on ethnohistorical research. Maverick, uppity, unstoppable, like in these books.
Read this book along with the other handsomely published book, Hidden Scholars, and we have a pair that opens up the idealized Southwest and the ideology of White Supremacy behind it. Schemes and sufferings, deals and derring-do abounded in the territory that now boasts our U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Laguna Pueblo citizen Deb Haaland. Don Fowler and his wife Catherine Fowler are themselves archaeologists/ethnographers in the Southwest borderland, my longtime good friends and colleagues, with an eye for arresting details and a story-telling style that make this book a gripping account of how the Romantic Ruins and fascinating Pueblos were created out in America's desert.
Initially published in 2000, this beautiful paperback reprint of respected archaeologist Don Fowler's A Laboratory for Anthropology tells the sweeping history tells of an idea, "The Southwest," through the development of American anthropology and archaeology.
For eighty years following the end of the Mexican-American War, anthropologists described the people, culture, and land of the American Southwest to cultural tastemakers and consumers on the East Coast. Digging deeply into public and private historical records, the author uses biographical vignettes to recreate the men and women who pioneered American anthropology and archaeology in the Southwest. He explores institutions such as the Smithsonian,…
