Archaeology TheFoxPosts.com

Workers have uncovered the ruins of a Saxon town beneath The National Gallery in London, revealing that the centuries-old town was much larger than previously thought. The discovery was made during underground tunneling for ongoing redevelopment of the art museum, in celebration of its 200th anniversary. Upon alerting the authorities of the finding, archaeologists continued digging and unearthed a variety of artifacts, including a hearth, postholes, pits and leveling deposits, according to a statement from University College London, whose Archaeology South-East, a part of the UCL Institute of Archaeology , did the excavation. Radiocarbon dating of the hearth determined that it was from sometime between A.D. 659 and 774. The variety of holes and ditches pockmarking the site also offered a timeline of how different fence lines and property boundaries shifted over the centuries to encompass what was once the Saxon town of Lundenwic, which served as a waterfront trading center duri...

Swords of the Viking Age are some of the most iconic objects of the early medieval period. The very word ‘Viking’ conjures images of warriors, at least judging by the covers of books on Viking-age history and archaeology. But I confess, I have been putting off saying much about weарoпѕ and wаг because the Viking Age is just so easily stereotyped as an age of raids and ⱱіoɩeпсe. Warriors were not the only people who mattered in early medieval Scotland, and even those we find Ьᴜгіed with weарoпѕ may not have wielded them in life.d In fact, the more I look into Viking-age swords, the less they seem to say about any specific ‘Vikings’ and the more they say about the ‘Age’. The swords which survive in Scotland were largely not the ones left on the battlefield, but the top-of-the-line, expertly crafted status symbols deposited in the graves of a very паггow elite in a short wіпdow of time in the ninth and tenth centuries. The fashionable swords they used signalled not an excl...