Archive

Mammoths in Staffordshire? Yes! A mammoth bone was recently discovered along the River Tame in Staffordshire. Megafauna remains are incredibly important for understanding deep history and past landscapes, but they’re more common in the West Midlands than you’d think. Most archaeology occurs within the first metre or so below ground, except for traces of Ice...

  Bone ice skates? Yes, these really were a thing in medieval times. During a small monitoring project undertaken last month in a Worcestershire village, a worked bone turned up in a medieval pit. It looks suspiciously like an ice skate. Or at least one in progress. Helpfully for us, a selection of 12th to...

  Archaeologists don’t look at fossils, right? Normally this is the case – palaeontology is the study of fossil animals and plants, whilst archaeology is concerned with the human past. Very occasionally though, fossils creep into the archaeological record. This month two fossilised shark teeth were found in a prehistoric pit during a site evaluation...

  Picture a tiny white glass bead decorated with four thin blue stripes.  Now shrink it. February’s star find is a miniscule Roman bead – 2.7mm across to be precise. It is so small that we’ve had to ask our in house digitisation team to take a photo of it, and even they exclaimed “there’s...

  A medieval cooking pot – not the prettiest, but the source of fascinating information none the less. Our January Find of the Month gives us an insight into the lives and eating habits of ordinary medieval people, and how these changed over time. This particular pot fragment, or sherd, is unusually large and helpfully...

  ‘An archaeological Christmas present and thrilling to find!’  This is how lucky archaeologists Tim and Jesse describe our December find of the month – a well preserved medieval oven. Cooking Christmas dinner probably conjures up images of gas hobs and electric ovens. Cooking dinner in this medieval stone built oven would definitely have required a...

  What counts as a ‘find’? To archaeologists, this term usually means artefacts we’ve uncovered. But what about archaeological features (pits, ditches and so on) – are they finds too? Both features and artefacts are things found by archaeologists, so in that sense yes they are. November’s find of the month is a Roman well,...

  During the early medieval period someone made several doughnut shaped rings of fired clay. Sometime later, these were placed in a pit. Around 1000 years later we excavated the same pit and found two whole and one fragmented ceramic rings. October’s find of the month are loom weights from one of our ongoing excavations...

Some finds, like the sword we found a few weeks ago, have an obvious significance and appeal. Most artefacts were everyday objects though, but even these have interesting stories to tell of the individuals who made and used them. September’s find of the month is one of these. This is the upper half of an...

  Our first Find of the Month, found on Tuesday in Gloucestershire, is a 2000 year old glass bead.   The lime green translucent bead has twisted yellow and blue glass threads wrapped around it (time has changed the blue to red). Due to the style of the bead, we believe it is early Roman,...