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West Kennet Long Barrow

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Examination of a chambered long barrow at West Kennet, Wiltshire communicated to the Society of Antiquaries by John Thurnam ,  In medieval times, and earlier, there must have been little speculation about the purpose of barrows and burial monuments on the British landscape. They were subject of myths and fairy tales, the homes of hobgoblins, and places where lover’s trysts, and the illegal exchange of contraband goods might have might taken place. It may have been only in the 19th century that people began to explore them and develop explanations for their existence, as just one of an enormous variety of landscape features that some 5000 to 10,000 years of human occupation have left behind. The people who started to wrestle with this history, the first archaeological pioneers, were members of an educated elite, reasonably wealthy, well read, well travelled, and often well placed in society. They drew their inspiration for the findings of the archaeological work that they were u...
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Quaternary Addendum

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  Series Title:- The Orkney Riddle  29/29 Blog Title:- Quaternary Addendum  " Archaeology in the North Sea " is intended to demonstrate that a spine of land connected Dogger Bank to a location in the northern North Sea that was accessible to Mesolithic people 10,000 years ago when sea-level was 50m below present. " Walkable Land in the North Sea " defines an area of land that would have been available for hunting, foraging, and transit for Neolithic people.  Here, I relate the geology of the North Sea to demonstrate that in a period between 60,000BP and 30,000BP,  a time in which an ice age is thought to have weighed heavily upon Britain,  in fact , although it was a bit chilly there were significant numbers of animals,  plants and people roaming the territory. The sequence of events that created the undersea landscape of the North Sea is roughly as follows :- Initially, in the last interglacial, 140,000 BP to 120,000BP, the North Sea may have been a r...
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Pentland Firth

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  Series Title:- The Orkney Riddle 5/29 Blog Title:- The Pentland Firth  The Pentland Firth is the channel of water that separates the Orkney archipelago from Caithness,  the northern most county of Scotland. It is deep, wide, and famously dangerous to cross,  even with modern boats and navigation systems. From the ferry crossing from Caithness to South Ronaldsay interesting surface phenomena indicate what is happening beneath the hull of the boat. Flat shiny areas of water commonly suggest an upwelling mix of currents , while whirlpools imply water being drawn down into the murky deeps.   "The Pentland Firth’s eastern approach hosts intricate sediment transport pathways. Time-averaging the modelled flow field revealed the recirculatory nature of the residual flow also reflected by the inferred sediment transport field identified via timeseries bathymetric analysis.  The Pentland Firth (PF), located between mainland Scotland and Orkney, is an area of the UK...
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Ice-sheet Britain

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  Series Title:- The Orkney Riddle  28/29 Blog Title:- Ice-sheet Britain  This is an attempt to contribute to a better understanding of how the topography of Britain was created by the presence of thick ice-sheets on its surface through multiple cold periods, over many millions of years.  Summary   We, in northern Europe, live in a post-glacial world. Every thing that we see in the geology of the British Isles, all of it with rare exceptions, is the product of geological events that occurred at the end of the last ice age. The glacial periods, as they occurred over the last 150,000 years were short bouts of heavy snow which was allowed to build on the mountains of Britain and Norway. Year on year thick snow built up on the mountains.  The height to which these ice sheets formed is said to be 1500 metres. This is a theoretical assessment and may or may not be accurate, but the thickness of ice was certainly hundreds of metres. This sheet of ice, as it perc...
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