Reading time: 4 minutes
Ask people how Stonehenge was built and you’ll hear stories of sledges, ropes, boats and sheer human determination to haul stones from across Britain to Salisbury Plain, in south-west England. Others might mention giants, wizards, or alien assistance to explain the transport of Stonehenge’s stones, which come from as far as Wales and Scotland.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Even though these animals are long extinct, we can draw some conclusions about their likely population because we can estimate their weights from palaeontological information. The dwarf hippo weighed around 130kg, and the dwarf elephant came in at just over 500kg. We also know how to translate weights to estimates of population size, longevity, survival and fertility. We can even use data collected from related species still living today, such as the pygmy hippo and the African elephant, to estimate how fast they would have grown.
Reading time: 5 minutes
Hundreds of years ago it was women who caused cultural traditions to spread – possibly through intermarriage – linking communities along Papua New Guinea’s south coast.
Reading time: 7 minutes
Both bread and wine are products of settled society. They represent the power to control nature and create civilization, converting the wild into the tamed, the raw into the cooked – and their transformation cannot be easily done alone. The very act of transforming the wild into the civilized is a social one, requiring many people to work together.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Our views of war are sanitised today. In an age of professional armies trained for increasingly technical tasks, few of us have witnessed combat, much less taken part in it. In that vein, commemorations of the 200th anniversary of Waterloo will focus on the battle’s strategic significance. There are, though, individual accounts that give us a glimpse into what sword fights and cavalry charges must have been like – and the deadly consequences of defeat.
Reading time: 5 minutes
There are few geographical areas that have seen as much military action as the Gallipoli region, the site of the Anzac landings in 1915. The conflicts in the region include some of the most renowned wars from Greek antiquity.
Reading time: 8 minutes
I’m the director of the Public Archaeology Facility, a research center specializing in cultural resource management. Our mission is to identify, evaluate and preserve significant sites, train students to be professional archaeologists and share our results with the public. We can work on up to 100 projects a year. Since our inception in 1972, the center has discovered more than 3,500 archaeological sites.
Reading time: 5 minutes
Many Christians believe that Glastonbury is the site of the earliest church in Britain, allegedly founded in the first or second century by Joseph of Arimathea. According to the Gospels, Joseph was the man who donated his own tomb for the body of Christ following the crucifixion. By the 14th century, it was popularly believed that Glastonbury Abbey had been founded by the biblical figure of Joseph. The legend emerged that Joseph had travelled to Britain with the Grail, the vessel used to collect Christ’s blood. For 800 years, Glastonbury has been associated with the romance of King Arthur, the Holy Grail and Joseph of Arimathea. Later stories connected Glastonbury directly to the life of Christ.
Reading time: 12 minutes With the unfortunate cancellation of the 2022 Air Tattoo at RAAF Base...
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Reading time: 5 minutes
1915 was a critical year for Australians, and not just because of the pride and myth-making associated with Gallipoli. Today we struggle to capture a sense of the profound shock and anxiety the landing at Anzac Cove brought to Australia. But it was this, together with a wider understanding that the war was not going well, that defined 1915 and drew Australians ever deeper into the vortex of total war.
Reading time: 8 minutes
In 1290 there was an investigation into their complaint and the records of that investigation still survive. The people of Grimsby told the king’s investigators that in the time of King Henry III ‘a certain small island was born’, the distance of ‘one tide’ from Grimsby, and fishermen began to dry their nets there. One day a ship was wrecked on the island, and someone made a cabin from the wreckage and began to live there. That man, the first permanent resident of this new land, began to sell food and drink to passing sailors.
Reading time: 6 minutes
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose History of the Kings of Britain was written in 1136, the mysterious monoliths at Stonehenge were first spirited there by the wizard Merlin, whose army stole them from a mythical Irish stone circle called the Giants’ Dance.
