Mike Pitts is a journalist and archaeologist who specialises in the study of British prehistory. He is the author of several books, including How to Build Stonehenge and Digging up Britain (Thames & Hudson).
In 2002 the remains of Sarah Baartman were buried in her South African homeland. She was among thousands of people around the world from whom body parts were collected in recent centuries and stored or displayed in museums. You might think, as tastes and norms change, returning these remains to their communities a simple thing.
The first smiths worked with copper and gold. Only when tin came to be added routinely to copper to make bronze did metal replace stone for tools and weapons. The innovation transformed Europe and Asia, creating new classes of makers and traders, and new ways to accumulate wealth and express power. And now a surprising
When the discovery of a new Iron Age hoard was announced this week, a video was released showing a long table laid out with ancient metalwork. The last time I saw anything similar was when the media were shown the Staffordshire Hoard in 2009. That was a pile of Anglo-Saxon military gold and silver, bought
As I write, hundreds of ancient human remains are secretly being buried in a remote desert 1,000km from Sydney (New South Wales national parks service recommends you take extra supplies, fuel and car parts). No one knows who the people were, how, or when they died. But the reburial has stirred deep emotions, with a
In recent years the study of human ancient DNA – extracted from excavated remains rather than living people – has become so popular that scientists are trying to clamp down on the number of samples taken from long-dead individuals. The research keeps coming, however, and it can be hard to keep up. One recent project
I’ve had a keen interest in Stonehenge since I directed my first excavation there more than 40 years ago. A personal highlight was identifying a skeleton in London’s Natural History Museum, which archaeologists thought had been destroyed in the Blitz, and which turned out to be the remains of an Anglo-Saxon man beheaded beside the stone
