Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[mongers]

A short 7 episode BBC podcast about the real life story of the Herefordshire Viking/Saxon coin hoard, the two detectorists who found it, hid it and the subsequent police investigation/court case, worth a listen if you like archeo stuff with a touch of humour/pathos.
     
Fool's Gold - Buried Treasure

June 2015, Herefordshire. Two Welsh detectorists - George Powell and Layton Davies - stumble upon a Viking hoard estimated to be worth up to £12m.

They could have become very rich and been celebrated as heroes in museums across the land. But instead, they began to hatch a criminal plot. Narrated by Aimee-Ffion Edwards (Detectorists/Slow Horses), this is the story of how to go from the luckiest treasure hunters on earth, to Newport's most wanted.

Narrator: Aimee-Ffion Edwards

[Legbiter]

Facial reconstruction of a Yamnaya man found in a kurgan in the Orenburg region. If you've taken one of these ancestry tests and your Y-chromosome haplogroup is some variation of R1b then he's your paternal Bronze Age ancestor.



https://x.com/i/status/1965012586744733709

[mongers]

Some twat/wanker has reversed into the Shakespeare family home:



Full story here:

Reversing car causes 'substantial damage' to Shakespeare family home - Conservation work could cost millions, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust warns

[The Brain]

Slings and arrows of outrageous driving.

[Sheilbh]

Not really archaeology but new research which is quite interesting - I think some of this was previously known but the detail on Ancoats is really striking and interesting as is her collusion:

Friedrich Engels 'took creative liberties' with descriptions of class divides in Manchester
Cambridge historian Emily Chung finds philosopher's blistering depictions of segregation may have been exaggerated
Mark Brown North of England correspondent
Tue 21 Oct 2025 05.00 BST

Friedrich Engels stands accused of exaggerating, or perhaps taking "creative liberties", with just how segregated Manchester was in the mid-19th century, a study has found.

The great socialist thinker, who co-authored with Karl Marx the Communist manifesto, was a Manchester resident, appalled and galvanised by the squalor and inequality he saw in the city.

His observations were published in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England, a blistering, furious polemic of life in Manchester seen as the defining text of the British industrial experience.

In it he described shocking segregation. He wrote about swathes of "unmixed working-people's quarters" stretching "like a girdle". Beyond them were the middle bourgeoisie in their townhouses and beyond that "in remoter villas with gardens in Chorlton and Ardwick" were the upper bourgeoise, also living it up on the "breezy heights of Cheetham Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome country air".

Many historians have taken Engels' observations at face value and assumed this was how Manchester was, with the middle classes sheltering in their smarter houses from the poor.

But the Cambridge University historian Emily Chung, by mapping digitised census data, has uncovered a much more complicated picture.

"I wouldn't go as far to as to say Engels was wrong," she said. "I think what my research shows is that Engels exaggerated and took creative liberties."

Chung's research shows that many middle-class Mancunians did in fact live in the same buildings and streets as those in the working class.

It finds that more than 60% of buildings housing the wealthiest classes also housed unskilled labourers. In Manchester's "slums", more than 10% of the population was from the better-off, employed classes.

"Manchester's wealthier classes did not confine themselves to townhouses in the city centre and suburban villas, as we've been led to believe," Chung said.

She uncovered evidence of doctors, engineers, architects, surveyors, teachers, managers and shop owners living alongside weavers and spinners.

"I found that not only did very diverse populations live in the same neighbourhoods, but they actually even lived in the same buildings. Different families were inhabiting the same buildings at the same addresses, even if they were very different classes."

It is important to know this, she said. "Segregation in cities remains a major concern in many parts of the world, including Britain, so understanding what people experienced in Manchester, one of the world's first industrialised cities, is really important."

Engels was only 22 when he moved to the city in 1842, sent by his father to help run a family-owned cotton mill in Salford.

His father hoped it would prepare his son for life as a businessman and knock out some of the more radical ideas he had picked up. It had the opposite effect.

In Manchester, he struck up a relationship with a poor, uneducated mill worker, Mary Burns, who guided him around slums where he found what he described as "cattle-sheds for human beings" and sharp separation between different classes.

Engels' observations of the city have had a profound effect. "Without Manchester there would have been no Soviet Union," said the historian Jonathan Schofield.

Chung's research, published on Tuesday in The Historical Journal, uses data from the digitised 1851 census to map where people from different social classes were actually living in the city.

"The most exciting moment was discovering that one in 10 people living in Ancoats, the notorious working-class slum, were middle-class," she said.

Chung has discovered a lot about where people lived but also what their daily routines were, and when – because of work patterns and policing – there clearly was segregation.

"While Victorian London and Liverpool bustled with daytime activity, Manchester's public spaces were almost deserted," she said. "Its streets were rarely occupied by weavers and doctors at the same time."

Chung's research argues that it was work, shopping, church and the pub that kept apart different classes far more than 'residential segregation'.

Her research process had been "gradual and gruelling", she said. "I think it proves that local history still matters and uncovering local stories actually allows you to really dig in deep and find things that you wouldn't if you're only looking at big national pictures.

[Jacob]

Really?

"Study concludes that broad sweeping generalization about secondary data (class make-up of different neighbourhoods) to support a primary point (class segregation and stratification across society) isn't 100% true when looked at in highly granular detail"?

10% of the residents of a working class neighbourhood were middle class, with a mere 90% being working class. Therefore Engels was taking creative liberties and exaggerating? 

I mean, the data itself is interesting and a more nuanced understanding is always welcome. But the framing is a bit ridiculous, IMO. Though I guess it's useful because it gets attention.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah - and as I say I think it was known to an extent but not on a detailed level. I found the framing a bit frustrating.

And the stuff about Ancoats I think is genuinely fascinating because it's the world's first industrial residential area - and arguably the world's first industrial slum. It makes sense as I think that middle class people living there would make it resemble what we know about contemporary slums.

But also I think it's a reminder that Engels was working in a moment when you had things like Charles Booth's poverty map of London which I think he spent over a decade working on conducting surveys and supported by census. But still produced maps like this (black is the lowest: "lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal" going through dark blue for "chronic want", then poor, mixed, fairly comfortable to red which is "middle-class, well to do" - there was another colour above for "upper-middle and upper class, wealthy"):


It is part of that 19th century taxonomical work - and a work of politics (like Booth's work). Although I think Engels did make a big deal of spatial urban segregation which was perhaps a bit broad brush. I think her conclusion on it being about work, shopping, church, the pub (Ancoats for example had no church but many pubs) is a useful re-framing.

[mongers]

A somewhat interesting recent palaeo-environmental study of an area of the river valley 300 metres from where I live.

The River That Swallowed the Ringwood Prehistoric Landscape: Geoarchaeological investigations in advance of the development of the A31, Hampshire, England
Jessica Taylor, Catherine T. Langdon, Rob Scaife and Nigel G. Cameron
Cite this as: Taylor, J., Langdon, C.T., Scaife, R. and Cameron, N.G. 2025 The River That Swallowed the Ringwood Prehistoric Landscape: Geoarchaeological investigations in advance of the development of the A31, Hampshire, England, Internet Archaeology 69. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.69.6

1. Introduction
The Avon Valley presents an extensive series of well-preserved river terraces and is home to some of Britain's most significant Palaeolithic archaeological records (Egberts 2016). These terraces represent the impacts of cyclic climatic fluctuations on the fluvial system, with repeated aggradation and incision resulting in a series of 14 gravel terraces (Egberts et al. 2020). The Avon Valley forms part of an 80km corridor through southern England, which was utilised by both hominins and animals during the Pleistocene (Egberts 2016). The draw of the valley did not wane with the onset of the Holocene, and archaeological remains of Mesolithic to modern age have been encountered within the valley and its surrounds.

The close of the Pleistocene brought climatic amelioration, resulting in the slowing of river flow and deposition of finer grained sediments. Well-preserved organic and palaeoenvironmental or archaeological indicators that would enable investigation of the interrelationships between humans and their environment occur rarely in this part of the Avon Valley (AOC Archaeology 2022).

In March 2022, VolkerFitzpatrick commissioned Connect Archaeology to carry out a geoarchaeological borehole evaluation on behalf of their client, National Highways, under the advice of Stantec and the Hampshire County Council Archaeologist. The work was carried out at the site of Jubilee Gardens (NGR: 414343, 105245: Figure 1). The site is situated to the west of Ringwood, Hampshire, and is bounded to the north by the A31, to the west by the River Avon, to the east by the Bickerley Millstream, and to the south by a channel extending between the two.

The geoarchaeological boreholes and subsequent palaeoenvironmental works aimed to investigate the Holocene sediments deposited within the site, and to determine their potential for characterising environmental change and providing context for archaeological remains in the vicinity of the site.

....

Also wasn't aware that agriculture likely kicked of this early in Southern England:

In the uppermost prehistoric deposit within which pollen is preserved and identifiable at 11.98 to 11.97m OD, cereal pollen emerges, suggesting the early settlement and developing subsistence strategies of human communities in the area sometime after the Early Neolithic radiocarbon date (SUERC-107892 (GU62615), 3530-3370 cal BCE, 4690±24 BP, Table 2)
....

Full paper here, with illustrations:
The River That Swallowed the Ringwood Prehistoric Landscape: Geoarchaeological investigations