Category: Historical Sites

Why we are still living with the legacy of Waterloo – that ‘most bloody battle’

Why we are still living with the legacy of Waterloo – that ‘most bloody battle’

by | May 5, 2025 | , , | 0

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.

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Inuit folklore kept alive story of missing Franklin expedition to north-west passage

Inuit folklore kept alive story of missing Franklin expedition to north-west passage

by | Mar 3, 2025 | , , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
The ships HMS Erebus and Terror, which sailed from England in the summer of 1845, were aiming to chart the north-west passage. They disappeared into what is now the Canadian Arctic. Stranded in the ice north-west of King William Island in the summer of 1846, the ships were abandoned by the surviving officers and men in the spring of 1848.

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Scientists at work: Public archaeologists dig before the construction crews do

Scientists at work: Public archaeologists dig before the construction crews do

by | Feb 17, 2025 | , | 0

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.

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Glastonbury: archaeology is revealing new truths about the origins of British Christianity

Glastonbury: archaeology is revealing new truths about the origins of British Christianity

by | Feb 10, 2025 | , , | 0

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.

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Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters

Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters

by | Oct 14, 2024 | , , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes The Native Mounted Police operated in Queensland for 80 years, starting in 1849. It consisted of small groups of between six and 15 Aboriginal troopers under the command of white officers. The troopers were typically recruited from areas far from where they were sent to serve. Detachments of troopers were regularly sent out on patrol, covering large areas along the frontier of the colony in pursuit of Indigenous people who were considered to be “problematic”. Their main job was to protect civilian settlers, the lands they had taken up, and their livelihoods – by whatever means necessary.

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DNA from elusive human relatives the Denisovans has left a curious mark on modern people in New Guinea

DNA from elusive human relatives the Denisovans has left a curious mark on modern people in New Guinea

by | Oct 7, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
An encounter with a mysterious and extinct human relative – the Denisovans – has left a mark on the immune traits of modern Papuans, in particular those living on New Guinea Island. This is a new discovery we describe in a study published in PLoS Genetics today. It further suggests that our modern human diversity didn’t just evolve – some parts of it we got from other, extinct human groups.

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David Grann’s The Wager: a drama of murder, insurrection, escape and an empire at sea

David Grann’s The Wager: a drama of murder, insurrection, escape and an empire at sea

by | Sep 16, 2024 | , , | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
In 1740, a modest squadron of ships from Britain’s Royal Navy departed Portsmouth in pursuit of an immoderate treasure. Commodore George Anson, who led the flotilla, was tasked with sailing south and west across the Atlantic Ocean, rounding Cape Horn, and interfering in imperial Spain’s lucrative trans-Pacific trade. But even before the mission got underway, its prospects of success appeared dubious. A sizeable proportion of the roughly 2,000 sailors and non-seamen under Anson’s command lacked suitable experience. Worse still was the fact that so many of them took up their posts already in a parlous state of health. It is little surprise, therefore, that Anson’s “famous” voyage around the world proved to be, for most of the men who undertook it, a journey of no return.

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World’s earliest evidence of a successful surgical amputation found in 31,000-year-old grave in Borneo

World’s earliest evidence of a successful surgical amputation found in 31,000-year-old grave in Borneo

by | Jul 30, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Modern medicine seems to advance with time thanks to research breakthroughs. Hence it’s often thought that further into the past, only simpler medical practices existed. The medical expertise of foraging communities such as hunter-gatherers has been thought to be rudimentary and unchanging. It’s been argued that shifts towards settled agricultural life within the past 10,000 years were what created new health problems and advances in medical culture; this includes surgery.

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