megalith mysteries

Some thoughts on

Stonehenge: Making Sense of a Prehistoric Mystery

by Mike Parker Pearson, Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Julian Thomas, Kate Welham.

Council for British Archaeology's Archaeology for All 2015

I didn't know much about Stonehenge before reading this and had only seen the monument from the roadside, but seeing that I sometimes get to cover ancient DNA work about various prehistoric populations and communities, I figured I should know something about it, so I picked up this book when I saw it at a charity shop.

I was surprised to learn that the site is a lot more complex and dynamic than I would have thought. It had been a major site even before those famous megaliths were installed, and there are five major phases of its development spanning more than a thousand years (2900-1600 BCE). Intriguing points I noticed include:

• The fundamentally egalitarian nature of pre-agricultural societies, which the authors seem to struggle to understand. They keep wondering about why we don't see the "elite" of stone age groups being marked in any obvious way. I would suggest that's simply because there was no elite, when you were hunting and gathering in a group of a few dozen people, you didn't have the resources to spare to feed a king and his entourage, even though you would still respect the experience of your seniors.
• The scientific challenges of finding out where those stones came from, how they were transported and erected etc.
• How it makes sense that populations that lived in wooden huts if they had any shelter at all spent all this effort to create stone monuments for their deceased. Apparently, an archaeologist visiting from Madagascar made that point clear based on his knowledge of similar megalith culture surviving in Madagascar to this day. The point is that life is transient but the afterlife is forever, so you want ephemeral structures for your lifetime but eternal ones for eternity. Makes sense, in a way. And we still use gravestones, too.
• Archaeologists also found related settlements nearby which may have housed the workers.
• Back in the days of megalith societies, the Orkney Islands were a major centre of excellence for building megalith sites. Part of the reason being that the settlers on those islands had used up all the trees and had to use stones for building by default, so they had more expertise in the use of stones.

prehistoric women ruled

While reporting on the revolutionary findings coming out of the sequencing of ancient DNA in the last two decades, I have occasionally come across the cases of buried bodies assumed to be male because they were associated with insignia of a warrior or a ruler, but then proven to be female by their DNA analysis. Which is always heartwarming but doesn't necessarily provide enough material to base a feature on.

Now the field progresses from individual genomes to systematically sequencing entire cemeteries and compiling family trees of humans who lived many millennia ago. Therefore we can now move beyond the stage of identifying single ancient women in apparent positions of power to looking at networks, such as matrilinear families, where the association with land and property appears to have been passed on in the female line.

Recent research into ancient genalogies has revealed several examples of such matrilinear groups (which may or may not have been matriarchies too), enough to base a feature on, which also highlights some of the unique women in roles previously assumed to be reserved to males.

My feature is out now:

Recognition for prehistoric women

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 22, 17 November 2025, Pages R1065-R1067

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

If I have crunched my numbers correctly, this is the 350th feature in this format, since I accepted the challenge to provide a feature for every issue, back in February 2011. I missed a couple of issues in the first few months, then one in 2014 and one in 2017.

The widespread use of ancient DNA sequencing to archaeological finds is now showing that women may have been more influential in some societies than hitherto appreciated. The photo shows excavation work at a burial site attributed to the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe in southern Britain.
(Photo courtesy of The Durotriges Project and © Bournemouth University.)

a potted history

Ceramics are amazing in that they record human history more comprehensively and more deeply than any other human-made artifacts, and yet they are still at the cutting edge of technology, being used as advanced materials in many of today's marvels.

So a book about the uses of ceramics eg in catalysis could be really exciting - which is why I agreed to review one such that was suggested to me. Sadly, it is one of the many monographs published these days with zero editorial effort. Thus, there is no general introduction to the field, and it is left to the authors of each of the chapters separately to tell the readers (again) why ceramics are both culturally fundamental and technologically important.

I do wonder why these books are still published at all - the papers could have very well been published as an online collection, a special issue of a journal or some such. If there's no effort to tie them together editorially to produce something that you might want to read in sequence, why tie them together with cardboard and glue?

Anyhow, after sampling too many of the chapters, I pulled together my own potted history of ceramics, as it were, and this is now out in the June issue of C&I:

Ceramic history

Chemistry & Industry Volume 88, Issue 6, June 2024, Page 34

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I'm happy to send a PDF on request.

Corded-Ware culture pottery from 2500 BC Source: Wikipedia

ancient family trees

Ancient DNA studies have moved on from finding out about amazingly old individuals. The latest thing is to sequence entire groups of humans who have been dead for centuries or even many millennia, and derive their family relations. A recent study of neolithic burial has set the record with a family tree connecting more than 60 individuals.

I used this as an occasion to round up a few other examples of family histories revealed by sequencing ancient DNA and to argue that, like ordinary family history, this is a way of unveiling the human histories that for one reason or another have remained hidden. My feature is out now:

Hidden histories

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 18, 25. September 2023, Pages R931-R934

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

Based on ancient DNA sequenced from 64 individuals buried at Gurgy, northern France, researchers have constructed the largest ever family tree of prehistoric people. The portraits are artistic impressions incorporating some details derived from the genome information. (Painting: © Elena Plain; reproduced with the permission of the University of Bordeaux/PACEA.)

ancient art

Prehistoric cave art has been found on all continents inhabited by humans, and it tells us not only about the early forms of artistic expression and the thinking of our distant ancestors, but also about their place in nature. I wrote a feature focusing on the biological and psychological aspects of this art, of which new and spectacular examples are still being discovered, described and dated to this day.

My feature is out now:


Cave art reveals human nature

Current Biology Volume 30, Issue 3, 03 February 2020, Pages R95-R98

FREE access to full text and PDF download




In a recently investigated cave painting from Sulawesi Island, Indonesia, minuscule stick figures armed with spears and ropes appear to be hunting anoas (Bubalus sp.). (Photo: Ratno Sardi, from Nature (2019) 576, 442–445.)

collapse ahead

Highly sophisticated societies have collapsed (i.e. lost a lot of of their complexity very quickly) in the past, and there is no reason why this couldn't happen to ours. In fact there are a few very good reasons to believe it will happen well within the 21st century, i.e. within the life-expectancy of everybody born in the richer countries from now on. (I do hope Mumsnet are reading this and can still turn things around!)

We're still wrecking the environment we depend on, and the financial crisis has shown how blindly we can run into a disaster, so, well, there may be interesting times ahead.

I've discussed all this in some detail in a feature that has appeared today:

Will our civilisation survive this century?

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 23, R1017-R1020, 2 December 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.11.028

Free access to full text and pdf download

After writing this feature, I was left with the feeling that we're standing at the edge of a cliff (no pushing at the back!). Since then, however, I've read a book for review that made me think maybe we're already one step further. Like those cartoon characters that stay suspended in mid-air until they realise that they are bound to fall. So I guess it's fine as long as we don't look down. More about that soon, when my review comes out. Now that's what I call a cliffhanger.

Extensive ruins such as those of the Roman colony of Thamugadi (Timgad) in modern-day Algeria remind us that civilisations can and do collapse. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/PhR61.) I actually visited Timgad many years ago. It does make a big impression.

PS Jan 2017: Oooops, I never did resolve that cliffhanger, did I? The book I was reviewing at the time was "The energy of nations" (review is in C&I Feb 2014, p51, but I forgot to blog about it), in which Jeremy Leggett argues that risk-blindness could lead the energy sector into a crash worse than the financial crisis, and big enough to lead to a collapse of civilisation. Now, as an irascible twitter troll takes over the White House and brings along his fossil fuel cronies, this prospect appears closer than ever.

evolution of writing

Something very scary happened in western Iran around 5000 years ago. People started using a writing system for their bookkeeping, used and developed it for a few centuries, and then stopped writing.

The system they used is called proto-Elamite script, it is obviously inspired by Mesopotamian cuneiform but has mostly developed its own symbols, which aren't completely decoded yet. Decoding it further may help to explain how and why people fell back to illiteracy.

I interviewed the leading researcher specialising in this script, who happens to be based in Oxford, and wrote a feature which is out in Current Biology today. And, writing for biologists, I've given the story a bit of a biological spin, hence the title:

The evolution of writing

Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 23, R981-R984, 4 December 2012 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.11.032

Free Access to full text (HTML and PDF version available)

Photo of a proto-Elamite tablet from the Louvre, Paris © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons

city

city – a guidebook for the urban age

by PD Smith

Bloomsbury 2012

Call me crazy but I love wandering about in big (European-style) cities. Ideally, they should have a historic core (Mediaeval will do, Roman ruins a bonus!), a big river, a university. Prague, Paris, Cologne, that sort of place is the perfect holiday destination for me.

But what makes cities so attractive, not just for me as a visitor, but for an increasing number of people to move into them, especially into the rapidly growing megacities (with more than 10 million people) of the developing world? Can the cultural history of “the city” be generalised to reveal insights into this form of human cohabitation and cooperation?

PD Smith has attempted this generalisation for cities throughout history and around the world. Like one of my random walks through a city, the book explores many avenues and sights, sometimes via unexpected passageways, and the author invites us to peruse the book in nonlinear fashion. Like the districts of a city, the book has themed section, but within their confines, surprise encounters may happen.

Smith highlights the advantages of a compact, walkable, people-friendly city (I might have mentioned Cologne as an example, where people walk, rollerskate, cycle etc. across the entire North-South extent of the city area on the marvellous river promenade), as opposed to the sprawling, car-friendly city (LA, Brasilia, Milton Keynes). People-friendly cities with adequate public transport and energy-efficient buildings are in fact more environmentally benign on a per-person basis than country lifestyles that heavily depend on driving.

Smith draws on an astonishing treasure trove of sources – including the many volumes that have been written about specific, much-loved cities such as Paris, Venice or New York , and on studies of specific topics like commuting, suburbia, or street art. Faithful readers of his book reviews in the Guardian and elsewhere will recognise some of the information nuggets.

Like any traveller, he always tends to gravitate back home to London, which for a time was the biggest and most powerful city of the world. He concludes the weighty tome with an outlook on the future of the city and with a memento mori, reminding us that all cities will fall to ruins one day.

Highly recommended for anybody who can appreciate cities as more than just the place they commute to.

(amazon.co.uk)

the song of the potter

Many years ago, I heard an April's fool story on the radio that went a bit like this:

Archaeologists have investigated the banded decorations on ancient Egyptian vases and found out that the potter had been singing during his work, and the vibrations transmitted through his arm were engraved in the vase, much like the early gramophones and the vinyl records. Building a special gramophone for Egyptian vases, the scientists managed to play back the song recorded thousands of years earlier. I think they actually played a soundclip they claimed to be a remastered version of that ancient recording. It was April 1st, though.

In an obituary of the physicist and Nobel laureate Georges Charpak published in El Pais (5.10.10) I now came across this story again, and it was no joke this time. Apparently, Charpak performed experiments to verify whether sound (in his case shouting, not singing) produced by potters could be recorded in the pottery. The paper reports that his colleagues at the institute thought he had gone potty, but sadly it doesn't relate the outcome of the experiment.

new finds from Dyson Perrins Laboratory

Back in the days when I worked at the New Chemistry Laboratory here, the building next door was the Dyson Perrins Laboratory (or DP), which was the codename for organic chemistry. When a new research lab was completed across the road, the chemists moved out, and some other departments moved in, including the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, which I always find sounds very interesting when I walk past it.

Now these guys have a paper out in today's issue of Science re. the carbon-dating of plant materials associated with specific phases Egyptian history. Here's the advance PR from Science magazine:

Nailing Down Ancient Egypt's Chronology:
For several thousands of years, ancient Egypt dominated the Mediterranean world--and scholars have busied themselves documenting the reigns of the various rulers of the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms. However, although the resulting chronologies have been quite precise in a relative way, assigning absolute dates to specific events has been a contentious task. Now, a detailed radiocarbon analysis of short-lived plant remains from the region is providing scientists with a long and accurate chronology of ancient Egypt that agrees with most previous estimates but also imposes some historic revisions. Christopher Bronk Ramsey and a team of international researchers collected radiocarbon measurements from 211 various plants, obtained from museum collections in the form of seeds, baskets, textiles, plant stems, and fruits, that were directly associated with particular reigns of ancient Egyptian kings. The researchers then combined this radiocarbon data with historical information abou t the order and length of each king's reign to make a complete chronology of ancient Egyptian dynasties. Their new chronology indicates that some events occurred earlier than predicted. It suggests, for example, that the reign of Djoser in the Old Kingdom actually started between 2691 and 2625 B.C. and that the New Kingdom began between 1570 and 1544 B.C. Bronk Ramsey and his colleagues found some discrepancies in the radiocarbon levels of the Nile Valley but suggest that it is due to ancient Egypt's unusual growing season, which is concentrated in the winter months.

Reference
"Radiocarbon-Based Chronology for Dynastic Egypt,"
C. Bronk Ramsey et al., Science 2010, 328, 1554.

Here's the old DP reflected in the new chemistry research building:



and here's the plaque commemorating its history: