HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2024-08-13T12:30:57.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Stonehenge: a historian’s guide to visiting the stones
items: Opinion: “Stonehenge is no longer a Neolithic monument – it is a pop culture phenomenon”
items: Your guide to Britain’s prehistoric stone circles
items: Visiting Avebury and Silbury Hill, the site of Neolithic Britons
items: Your guide to Stonehenge, plus 12 fascinating facts you might not know
items: “Graves are like time capsules – little microcosms of prehistoric culture”: Alice Roberts on what bones and burials can tell us about early Britain
items: Medieval(ish) matters #9: Do early medieval Irish texts shed light on prehistoric incest?
items: Medieval matters #1: The Last Kingdom, Robin Hood and how to learn Old Norse in lockdown
items: What is the earliest evidence for a battle in Britain?
items: In pictures: Stonehenge tourism

Stonehenge: a historian’s guide to visiting the stones
type: item
date: 2022-02-22T12:29:52.000Z
creator: Mike Pitts
subject: 21st Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stone Age
subject: Stonehenge
description: Heading to the world’s most famous henge this spring and want to get the most from your visit? Archaeologist Mike Pitts offers a closer look at the site, with a handy guide that will have you scoping out the stones like an expert…
encoded: There’s a lot to do at Stonehenge, but I’ll start with the obvious: stones. There are many, and they’re not all the same. The path up to the site takes you to a close vantage point (and a good place for photos) from which you look south east across to the monument. Many are fallen on this side, so as you move to right and left you can see into the centre of the henge. The first thing to notice is that there are two sizes and shapes of stone. Most are large and slab-like, and include horizontal lintels: these are made from sarsen, a hard sandstone sourced from within 20 miles. The smaller more rounded pillars, with no lintels, are the bluestones. Most of these are igneous rocks brought from south-west Wales (behind you), a journey of more than 200 miles. The completed Stonehenge had a ring of 30 standing sarsens supporting a ring of 30 lintels. These surrounded five groups, each of two taller sarsens independently supporting a lintel, known as trilithons. The trilithons stood on a horseshoe plan open to the rising midsummer sun to the north-east (roughly to your left). Bluestones (many more than there are now) were arranged in a ring inside the sarsen circle, and more stood inside the horseshoe, again mirroring the plan. A closer look The more you look, the more you see. Every stone is different. Sarsens were heavily dressed with stone hammers, and when the light is right you can sometimes pick out effects of such work, shallow parallel grooves and smoothed surfaces. You can see many irregular hollows left from the original boulders. At the base of one large standing sarsen is a curious flat block: this is concrete, put there in the 1960s to fill a large natural hole that the authorities worried was unsafe. Look closely at the top of that stone and toward the right edge you can see a lump like an upturned bowl. This is a tenon, carefully carved, that would have fitted into a hollow or mortise in the lintel that it and its partner supported, to form a trilithon. The t…

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Opinion: “Stonehenge is no longer a Neolithic monument – it is a pop culture phenomenon”
type: item
date: 2022-02-17T12:23:37.000Z
subject: 21st Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stone Age
subject: Stonehenge
description: Viewing all of Neolithic Britain through the lens of one monument shuts down an understanding of the diversity of the period, writes Dr Kenny Brophy, head of the archaeology department at the University of Glasgow
encoded: As an archaeologist, an intense interest in Stonehenge is supposed to be a given. It must surely be my favourite site, a place I regularly visit to hug standing stones? And yet, I can’t bring myself to love Stonehenge. My relationship with this monument is, as I am sure is the case for many archaeologists, complicated. This is because it means so much to so many people, and it exists in so many contexts outside of archaeology, that is has ceased to simply be an archaeological site, a thing of the past alone. In fact, it is much easier to make sense of what Stonehenge was four or five thousand years ago than pin down exactly what it means today, and I think that makes (some) archaeologists uncomfortable. Taken purely on its archaeological merits, there is no doubt that it is impossible for a prehistorian like me to ignore Stonehenge. I need add nothing to the countless books and articles that have been written about it and the complex prehistoric landscape it sits within, rightly designated a World Heritage Site. The ever-increasing volume of radiocarbon dates, excavation results, and geophysical surveys, inform how the monument is now displayed to the public, what we are able to write about it, and how the site developed from the Mesolithic period onwards. Each new theory is presented as finally sorting Stonehenge out, until another excavation or idea comes along. There is also no doubt that Stonehenge and the landscape that it sits within is internationally significant. The stone circle itself is spectacular and unique (another way of saying this is that it is weird and anomalous). But Stonehenge is much more than just a fantastic archaeological site. Unlike hundreds of stone circles in the UK, it has escaped the specialist world of archaeologists to belong to millions across the world. Stonehenge has transcended the genre of megalith and is now a celebrity stone circle. It is only because it consists of mute standing stones that it has not been asked to appear on …

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Your guide to Britain’s prehistoric stone circles
type: item
date: 2022-02-16T06:06:00.000Z
subject: General prehistory
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stone Age
subject: Stonehenge
description: Did you know that Stonehenge is undeniably a stone circle – but it’s not a henge. How do you tell the difference? David Musgrove talks to Richard Bradley about when and why henges and stone circles were built across Britain…
encoded: Stonehenge is, for many of us, the one place that represents Britain’s prehistory. The celebrated stone circle standing proud on Salisbury Plain with its trademark lintel-topped sarsens has been an enduring source of fascination for millennia. The first monument there, a circular ditch and bank, was dug in c2900 BC, and a timber or stone circle erected inside it. Then, much later, in c2400 BC, the first monoliths of local rock were brought in. Over the course of the next several hundred years, stones were put up, taken down, moved around, added to, and then finally re-erected to the shape we see today. Stonehenge is undeniably a stone circle, but it’s not a henge, even though it has lent its name to the group of monuments that go under that title. The concept of the ‘henge’ was introduced by a man called Thomas Kendrick in 1932 and technically, a henge is a circular earthen bank with a ditch inside it and one or more entrances through the bank. At Stonehenge, there is a circular bank, but it is inside a ditch, so these elements are the wrong way round. Nevertheless, stone circles and henges do appear to be connected parts of a tradition that developed in Britain from around 3000 to 2000 BC – in other words, during the later Neolithic period (when agriculture began here) and moving into the earlier Bronze Age (when we see the first use of metals, from about 2400 BC). Stone circles are often positioned within henges, sometimes in replacement for earlier timber circles, so there is a link between the two types of monument, though it’s not an absolutely clear one, as Richard Bradley explains: “Henges and stone circles are separate things that often coalesce. You’ve got plenty of stone circles that don’t have henges, and plenty of henges that don’t have stone circles. They each can pursue an independent existence but they are both different expressions of a more basic idea that special places ought to be circular, which seems quite natural to us, but large parts of Europ…

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Visiting Avebury and Silbury Hill, the site of Neolithic Britons
type: item
date: 2022-02-15T08:07:00.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stone Age
description: Spencer Mizen visits Avebury, Wiltshire, in the company of Jim Leary, to investigate two of the British Isles' most enigmatic Stone Age monuments
encoded: I usually start my week sat at an office desk in the heart of a busy city. Not today. This morning I find myself in the middle of a field, admiring the largest man-made mound in Europe, one that has adorned the Wiltshire countryside for 4,500 years. I’m craving coffee, my feet are soggy and it looks like it might rain. But, as Monday mornings go, a visit to Silbury Hill takes some beating. Rising 31 metres into the sky, Silbury Hill is a seriously impressive piece of engineering, one of the most enigmatic of all the edifices left to us by Britain’s Stone Age inhabitants. But, better still, it is just one jewel in a treasure trove of Neolithic (literally meaning ‘New Stone Age’) monuments clustered around the Wiltshire village of Avebury – and, on this particular Monday morning, I’m getting a guided tour. Dollop of guesswork If I find myself wondering how on earth Silbury Hill got here, then I’m far from alone. It seems that people have been coming here to ponder its provenance since the arrival of the Romans 2,000 years ago. The first tourists could only employ their imaginations – and a healthy dollop of guesswork – to try to solve Silbury’s riddle. I, on the other hand, have Dr Jim Leary, director of the Archaeological Field School at the University of Reading, to help me get to the bottom of its mysteries. “In some ways you can compare Silbury to the early Egyptian pyramids,” says Jim. “It is roughly contemporary and it is of a comparable height and volume.” But there the comparisons end. While the pyramids were grand statements designed to achieve maximum impact, Silbury is a lot more self-effacing. “Sure, it’s big,” says Jim. “In fact, if you plonked it in the middle of Trafalgar Square it would reach three-quarters of the way up Nelson’s Column. But come and look at the place and you’ll soon notice that it’s surrounded by hills, almost hidden in the countryside. Whoever built Silbury wasn’t trying to achieve shock and awe.” And whoever built Silbury didn’t do …

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Your guide to Stonehenge, plus 12 fascinating facts you might not know
type: item
date: 2022-02-14T05:05:00.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Stone Age
subject: Family and parenting
subject: Stonehenge
description: Stonehenge is one of the world’s most famous monuments. Located in Wiltshire and managed by English Heritage, the prehistoric site attracts more than one million tourists each year. But when was Stonehenge actually constructed? What was it used for? And why did Charles Darwin pay a visit in the 1880s?
encoded: Standing proud on Salisbury Plain in southern England, Stonehenge is one of the most iconic monuments in the world. Well over a million people visit the site every year and numbers are on the rise, especially since the opening of a new visitor centre. Yet very little is really known about the structure; a complete absence of written material means that we can only speculate about its creation and significance. As a result, Stonehenge has been a constant source of conjecture, from the earliest recorded tourists to the present-day archaeologists and academics who work there. The site, as we see it, comprises a confusing jumble of stone uprights, some capped with lintels, together with their fallen compatriots, all set within a low, circular earthwork. You can’t enter the stone circle during normal opening hours (that’s only possible on special tours), so for most visitors the site is visible only from afar: tantalising, enigmatic and out of reach. Follow the links below to jump to each section: Why was Stonehenge built? How old is Stonehenge? How many stones were used to build Stonehenge? Where do the stones for Stonehenge come from? What have been the biggest threats to Stonehenge? 12 fascinating facts about Stonehenge In 2018, historian Miles Russell – who was part of a team excavating within the central uprights of Stonehenge in the first archaeological investigation there for 70 years – took on the top questions about Stonehenge for BBC History Revealed… <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/3432840-6b3cb00.jpg" width="800" height="530" alt="A visitor stands on a toppled standing stone at the megalithic structure of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. (Photo by General Photographic Agency/Getty Images)" title="A visitor stands on a toppled standing stone at the megalithic structure of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. (Photo by General Photographic Agency/Getty Images)" /> Q: Why was Stonehenge built? Over the years there have been m…

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“Graves are like time capsules – little microcosms of prehistoric culture”: Alice Roberts on what bones and burials can tell us about early Britain
type: item
date: 2021-08-11T09:05:20.000Z
subject: Bronze Age
subject: General prehistory
subject: Iron Age
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stone Age
description: Alice Roberts speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about her book Ancestors, which explores the story of prehistoric Britain through seven burials – and reveals what cutting-edge science can tell us about the ancient past
encoded: What kind of things might you find in a prehistoric grave, and what could they reveal about the past? Prehistory is intensely interesting to me because the only way that we can approach it is through archaeology. You are left to piece together the story through traces left in the ground – the material objects of ancient cultures, remnants of constructions and buildings, and the remains of our own ancestors. There’s an often forensic process that goes on when you’re trying to reconstruct what life was like in the prehistoric era, and burial sites represent a treasure trove of information. Graves such as that of the [early Bronze Age] Amesbury Archer or the “Red Lady of Paviland” [actually a young man who died 33-34,000 years ago] are absolutely stuffed with cultural artefacts. They essentially act as time capsules – little microcosms of the culture of the time. As well as the objects we find in graves, we’re able to extract ever more information from the bones themselves. For me, as a biological anthropologist, it’s been astonishing how the science around this has developed over the past 20 to 30 years. What kind of information can we glean from bones? If I’m presented with a skeleton, I can tell quite a lot just by looking at the bones with the naked eye. I have a background as a medical doctor and before I started learning the business of osteoarchaeology, I would have thought: “It’s just a skeleton. How much can you really tell? You can’t ask it about symptoms, you can’t do blood tests.” But I was astonished at how much you could work out. First, bone responds to disease. Some infections, such as syphilis and tuberculosis, affect bone in very distinctive ways. Osteoarthritis is also easy to identify from tiny holes on the surface of a joint. Next you can look at teeth. People suffered from dental disease in the past, just as we do today, but most prehistoric people actually had much better teeth than ours because they didn’t have such a starchy, sugary diet. They …

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Medieval(ish) matters #9: Do early medieval Irish texts shed light on prehistoric incest?
type: item
date: 2020-06-24T10:32:25.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Anglo-Saxon
subject: Bronze Age
subject: Early medieval
subject: General prehistory
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Norman
subject: Period
subject: Stone Age
subject: Medieval kings and queens
subject: Medieval matters blog
description: HistoryExtra content director David Musgrove asks two scholars for their views on what, if anything, we can learn about attitudes of Neolithic people in Ireland (particularly about incest) from studying much later early medieval documents
encoded: Royal incest is always going to grab the headlines. And so it proved last week when a fascinating study was published in Nature revealing the results of a project, whose first author is Dr Lara Cassidy at Trinity College Dublin, sampling human bone remains from Neolithic Irish sites. The most eye-catching of several interesting results came from analysis of an adult male, whose cranial remains were found inside the famous 5,000-year-old Newgrange passage grave in Brú na Bóinne, the world heritage site in Ireland's Boyne valley. His genome indicated that he was “the offspring of a first-order incestuous union” (born to parents who were either siblings, or parent and offspring). The bones of this individual were found in what is assumed to be a prestigious position in the inner chamber of the Newgrange monument. Read more medieval matters blogs from David Musgrove: The Last Kingdom, Robin Hood and how to learn Old Norse in lockdown Back to Braveheart, Viking river boats, & the Crusades The salmon of knowledge & rolling Roman mosaics Chivalry, medieval killer rabbits and prisoners of war in the 15th century Dr Cassidy and her co-authors observed that sibling-to-sibling incest has been recorded among elites in other societies (including the Inca Empire and ancient Egypt), and that “this behaviour co-occurs with the deification of political leaders and is typically limited to ruling families”. Thus the headline of the story in the Daily Mail began “Ireland's ancient kings married their sisters and fathered inbred children to maintain dynastic bloodlines”. Medieval mythology That is a pretty newsworthy story in itself, but in addition, Dr Cassidy and her team also noted that: “The Brú na Bóinne passage tombs appear in medieval mythology that relates their construction to magical manipulations of the solar cycle by a tribe of gods, which has led to unresolved speculation about the durability of oral traditions across millennia. Although such longevity seems unlikely, our r…

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Medieval matters #1: The Last Kingdom, Robin Hood and how to learn Old Norse in lockdown
type: item
date: 2020-05-01T09:45:59.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Anglo-Saxon
subject: Early medieval
subject: General prehistory
subject: Iron Age
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Norman
subject: Period
subject: Plantagenet
subject: Stone Age
subject: Viking
subject: Medieval kings and queens
subject: Medieval life
subject: Medieval Life and Death
subject: Medieval matters blog
subject: The Last Kingdom
subject: Viking Britain
description: HistoryExtra content director David Musgrove rounds up the latest medieval content on the website this week – and reveals how he's been trying to learn Old Norse. Plus, what else is new in the Middle Ages?
encoded: What’s new in the Middle Ages? As the most medievally-inclined member of the HistoryExtra team, I’m going to start a weekly round-up of what I’ve been enjoying in the world of medieval history. I’m going to take a broad view of what medieval means, so anything from late Roman up to the late 15th century will be fair game. And actually, I’ll probably allow myself an occasional interlude into prehistory too. If anyone reads this, I’m going to cajole my colleagues to do similar round-ups for later periods and genres of history. My plan is to highlight what’s been happening on HistoryExtra from a medieval perspective, on our podcast, and in our print magazines BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed. Plus, I’ll generally be keeping an eye open for anything else that’s going on medieval-wise. So, first up, it’s been a big week for Anglo-Saxon and Viking aficionados because Netflix has dropped the entire 10 episodes of the fourth season of the Bernard Cornwell-penned The Last Kingdom. King Alfred is dead and we’ve got Edward the Elder and Aethelflaed front and centre in the action. I don’t know what viewer figures have been like but I’m guessing a lot of people have been bingeing, given the state of the world right now. Certainly a lot of you have been enjoying our The Last Kingdom content on the site – if you’ve not seen it yet, this page is a good place to start. Ryan Lavelle, historical advisor to the series, has been blogging his way through all ten episodes for us too, giving us the lowdown on what to look out for from a historian’s perspective. Check it out here. Meanwhile, back in the real world, pandemics are unsurprisingly still big news, and we’ve seen lots of people reading over our Black Death content on the site. In the current issue of BBC History Magazine, there’s loads of great stuff, including a feature by Catherine Rider on medieval magic. She did a great piece for the site at the start of the year on medieval ways to look ahead to the new year. I’…

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What is the earliest evidence for a battle in Britain?
type: item
date: 2015-10-11T13:22:37.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Stone Age
subject: Roman Britain
description: The earliest written evidence for conflict in Britain comes from the testimony of a certain Roman general
encoded: In August 55 BC, Julius Caesar invaded southern England, officially in order to teach the Britons a lesson (he argued that they had helped his enemies in France). Things did not all go Caesar’s way, however, his heavily armoured Roman legionaries having to jump from their ships and wade through the sea towards a well-prepared, and drier, foe. Using ship-mounted artillery, Caesar was able to clear a part of the beach and, with Roman soldiers rallying around their standard bearer, a beachhead was finally established. We don’t know exactly where all this happened, but it is traditionally thought to have occured somewhere near Walmer in Kent. Archaeologically speaking, the earliest battle evidence from the British Isles comes from the Neolithic or New Stone Age, when the farmers were first competing for limited resources. At Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire and Hambledon Hill in Dorset, the earthen ramparts of two settlements were attacked, some time around 3300 BC, and their defences partially levelled. Large numbers of flint arrowheads have been found at the entrances to both sites, probably where the fighting was fiercest. Unfortunately, in the absence of written accounts, we have no way of knowing who was fighting whom (nor why). This article was taken from BBC History Revealed magazine

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In pictures: Stonehenge tourism
type: item
date: 2015-05-14T08:49:12.000Z
subject: General prehistory
subject: Period
subject: Stone Age
subject: Stonehenge
description: Stonehenge's long heritage as a tourist attraction came under the spotlight in 2015, in an exhibition that featured historical souvenirs, guidebooks, postcards and photographs. We take a closer look at some of the artefacts…
encoded: Find out more about the standing stones: Your guide to Stonehenge, plus 12 fascinating facts you might not know Prehistoric religion: a pagan riddle we will never solve? Read more about the history of tourists at Stonehenge

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