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I second the pencil museum - surprisingly interesting in connecting the landscape to one of the tools of our trade!

Altho the RCHME described the camp on Beacon Hill in 1913 it wasn't on early OS maps so doesn't appear in more popular works like Cox's 'Green Roads of England' or Thomas's 'Icknield Way', which describes the hill as "tipped with a tumulus and scored upon its flanks by many old descending trackways"

I'm not sure you've entirely grasped the point of social media Brian 😉

OMG OGS

"it was simply assumed that someone of such status must be male" - not quite, since Cunnington explicitly says "The first [skeleton] appeared, from the largeness of the bones, to have been the skeleton of a stout man"; so an assumption, yes, but based on bones not grave goods...

*built in their entirety after 1945 - info from wikipedia as the list is hard to search in this way. Five of them are at one Oxford college, for some reason…

I believe the one about coots

A lot less down to earth, but far more interesting to me, is Jacquetta Hawkes' anti-nuclear lost-world novel 'Providence Island', which I wrote about (with plenty of spoilers) here:

Jacquetta Hawkes: For Her A Prehistoric OrgyReading 'Providence Island'prescapes.substack.com

'Cold Earth' by Sarah Moss captures the strangeness of working in remote places (Greenland in this case)

Yes - the idea that there's a continuous historic landscape beyond specific sites may not be well understood. Modern estates might also reflect the layout of the fields that preceded them while rights of way that make little sense today preserve routes between places now subsumed into the suburbs

The oldest of old archaeological jokes that I've come across is John Donne's epigram 'Antiquary', which is basically a meaner version of that Agatha Christie line: "If in his study he hath so much care To hang all old strange things, let his wife beware."

Archaeological, definitely; good…?

Was it a millionaire who said ‘Imagine no possessions’?

A brave defence! I hope the revenues will be ring-fenced for net zero but I suspect it will be framed entirely in terms of jobs, growth and energy security, none of which it will do much for - and for anyone who cares about the climate the optics look terrible anyway

To quote the Prähistorische Bronzefunde volume on British rapiers: “The terms ‘dirk’ and ‘rapier’ are essentially terms of convenience derived from 19th C antiquarian use…The description rapier is valid in the sense that there is an obvious physical and functional resemblance to more recent rapiers”

Also telling that the onus falls on households not local authorities, ignoring the inequalities between those who do and don’t have the resources to stockpile

The joy of prehistory is in navigating precisely those two positions!

Yes I wonder about the latter given it seems to have been a rather modest barrow

Absolutely - it's a big decision to put all that stuff beyond use (in this world, at least)

To be fair to Piggott he mentioned shamans as one possibility among different types of ritual authority/prestige ("One would rightly hesitate before producing an early Bronze Age shaman on Salisbury Plain..."), a nuance lost in subsequent citations...