Archive

Prehistoric wood is archaeological gold dust. So, what do you call Worcestershire’s first Iron Age wooden trackway and a whole wetland landscape? Exceptional. This is not an archaeologist’s dream, but a site excavated for Worcester Six Business Park. Despite the unassuming location (alongside Junction 6 of the M5), in 2019 we uncovered human activity around...

A flint tool As you may have seen in our blog post for Find Of The Month – April 2021, fragile finds from the Neolithic/Early Bronze Age include tools formed from flint.  This is about a flint known as a “fabricator”. What we found From one of the quarry sites we are working on, our...

Not just one find of the month! Every year as spring approaches many of our archaeology teams are out working in quarry sites across the region, monitoring the soil-stripping for forthcoming phases of gravel extraction. Large areas of topsoil are stripped, and it is in these sites that we most often discover archaeology and in...

What do animals mean to you? For our second blog in the series about prehistoric landscapes, Liz Pearson, our Environmental Archaeologist, explores the tale of two Bronze Age burials, their unusual choice of animal companions and relationship with the land. From the edge of the woodland we see four people lay the body of a...

  Over 3000 years ago, fingertips were pressed into the damp clay of a large pot, creating a patterned band and dimpling the top. Once dry, it was fired and used before being broken – several large fragments were put into an isolated pit on the gravel ridge east of the River Severn. Prehistoric pots,...

  Saturday 17th February is 1 Day Without Us – a national event to celebrate migration, migrants and the contribution they make to society. Migration is the source of much discussion in the UK at present and, for some, invokes strong opinions. It is sometimes portrayed as a new phenomenon with a clear division between...

In the second of our Halloween inspired blog posts we take a look at a recent site which produced a grave that was seemingly missing a body! During late 2016 and early 2017 a team from Worcestershire Archaeology carried out one of the largest excavations in their history in connection with the creation of a...

Around 4000 years ago a 30-40 year old woman was cremated and her remains buried in an upturned pot, or burial urn. In 2015 we found this Bronze Age burial and carefully excavated the contents back in the office. Analysis of the urn and its contents has now been completed and the urn has recently...

What’s so unusual about an old pot falling apart? Isn’t that just what old things do?   This particular pot is decorated and comes from a Bronze Age cremation cemetery in Staffordshire, so it is at least 3500 years old. The pot was found fairly whole, standing up in a small pit, filled with a...

Our recent Broadway excavations feature in Current Archaeology Magazine Issue 326, on sale now! There’s a double-page spread featuring a fantastic birds-eye view by Aerial-Cam, shown here with some of the archaeologists who’ve been working on the site. Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service staff from the Broadway excavation and analysis team We’ll be back out on site soon...