Archive

Our Roots in Time project, based around 2022’s community excavation at Evesham’s New Farm Nature Reserve, has got us thinking about human nature. Prehistory is often thought of as being primitive – a time when life was just about survival and people were perhaps less intelligent than today. But archaeology shows us that this idea...

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...

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...

Fascinating stories are found in the smallest of archaeological clues: charcoal and pollen. Recent analysis of a Bronze Age burial site at Meriden, in the West Midlands, illuminates this prehistoric landscape and the choices made by our ancestors 3,500 years ago. To kick off this blog series, our Environmental Archaeologist, Liz Pearson, sets the scenery...

A couple of years ago we ran Lost Landscapes, a project on Ice Age Worcestershire, along with Museums Worcestershire. Funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England we drew together research and information on half a million years of history, from the time our first ancestors arrived until the end of the last...

A lump of rusty old iron – nothing to write home about, or is it? Unlike copper and bronze, iron quickly rusts and easily distorts beyond recognition. With the recent discovery of Iron Age ironwork at a site south of Worcester, we thought it was time to explore the tricky topic of identifying iron artefacts....

It's International Lefthanders Day. Roughly 10% of the world's population are left-hand dominant. But for how long has this been the case? There's plenty of evidence in the archaeological record to suggest that handedness runs deep in our evolutionary history.

  The turn of the nineteenth century was an important point in our recognition and understanding of the Ice Age. The whole of the earth’s history had been understood to fit within the few thousand years described in the bible, but this was about to change. Eighteenth century scientists wrestled with problematic discoveries of elephant-like...

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...

Last term we were contacted by a teacher from the Royal Grammar School (RGS) Springfield. Their Year 5 pupils were studying the history of Worcester as that term’s topic, using the idea of a Time Travel Agency needing information for a new brochure. The teacher asked us whether we could help, and the answer was...