kent
aardvarchaeology | June 27, 2013On 10 June I blogged about some grisly finds from Cliffs End in Kent which to my mind indicate eight centuries of human sacrifice during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. I invited colleagues at Wessex Archaeology who did the dig to comment, and Chief Osteoarcheologist Jacqueline McKinley kindly sent me some detailed views.
The first thing to note is that though the full monograph hasn't appeared yet and my blog entry was based on a pop-sci feature in British Archaeology, a scholarly paper on the site has in fact been published:McKinley, Schuster, & Millard 2013. Dead-sea connections: a…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2013British Archaeology #131 (July/August) has a feature by Pippa Bradley that caught my interest. It's about a Wessex Archaeology dig in 2004-05 at Cliffs End farm in Thanet, a piece of north-east Kent that was an island up until the 16th century when silting finished connecting it to mainland England. What we're dealing with here is ritual murder, some pretty strange disposal of the dead and ancient Scandinavian migrants.
Use of the site begins in earnest with six ring-ditch barrows during the Early Bronze Age (2200-1500 cal BC). These were poorly preserved and yielded few interesting finds.…