The objects, which he describes as cylinders, are clay tubes about the size and shape of a little finger—like elongated beads. Because of their shape, and because they were found near pottery vessels inside the tomb, he suspects they might have served as tags that could be strung on the vessels to identify something about them, whether their contents, their owner, or their origin or destination. If that is the case, he speculates that the writing could denote names, or descriptions of property.

The generally accepted origin story of the alphabet as we know it holds that in 1800 BCE, Semitic speakers in Egypt, aware of the Egyptian writing system's mix of characters that stood for words and symbols that stood for sounds, wanted a system of their own and borrowed the Egyptians' alphabetic portion. Semitic languages are the predecessors of most of today's Middle Eastern languages.

I had always assumed – without realising the assumption – that the ancient knowledge keepers would have progressed around the henge posts or stones much as I do around a memory palace. It hadn’t occurred to me that there may be experts on each topic, ‘owning’ each post or stone and the knowledge it represented. Is there any way the archaeology could ever tell us if this is the case?

In 2019, an unusually dry summer caused the waters of the Valdecañas Reservoir to recede, revealing a monument that has come to be referred to as the “Spanish Stonehenge.” NASA satellites captured images of the exposed stones known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, which experts suspect may have been built sometime in the second or third millennium BCE.

Firstly, an entire tribe moving from Wales to the Salisbury Plain took their encyclopaedia with them. This would require the circle to be erected in the same order as in Wales and oriented in the same direction. In effect, these people were taking their database of knowledge with them, the structure in the stones, and the data in their memories. Secondly, a different tribe conquering those in Wales might identify just how effective this memory technique is and steal only the technology. Essentially, they stole the database structure and filled it with their own data. The bluestones are particularly suited to a mnemonic purpose due to the blotches and blobs in their material makeup.

Equally, Waun Mawn did not become the core of a monument complexof the kind known around other great stone circles, such as the Ring of Brodgar, Aveburyand Stonehenge. Its development as a major centre in the earlier Neolithic (seeFigure 1)appears to have been curtailed by early dismantling. Although the region was probably notentirely evacuated—the four remaining stones at Waun Mawn possibly symbolise the iden-tities of those groups who remained local—it may have been extensively depopulated. Onlyfurther research into settlement and land-use employing other lines of evidence, such as paly-nology, will provide answers.

The four surviving stones at Waun Mawn are of unspotted dolerite, and possibly derive fromoutcrops 3km to the south-east at Cerrigmarchogion on the Preseli ridge (Bevinset al.2014).

As some of these samples could alsohave been either residual or intrusive, we propose that the stone circle was erected inc. 3600–3000 cal BC.This date would place Waun Mawn amongst the earliest stone circles in Britain, alongsideLong Meg and her Daughters in Cumbria (109m diameter) and the stone circle beneath thepassage tomb of Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey (18m diameter).

To resolve this, radiocarbon dating of these samples fromWaun Mawn was conducted in conjunction with optically stimulated luminescence (OSL)dating of sediment from within the packing deposits that were contemporaneous with themonoliths’erection, and fromfilled-in sockets (from after the monoliths’removal). OSL dat-ing determines the burial age of sediments, with the dating signals being reset by light expos-ure immediately prior to deposition (Smedley2018).

geologist Herbert Thomas,who established that the spotted dolerite bluestones at Stonehenge originated in the PreseliHills of west Wales, where, he suspected, they had originally formed a“venerated stone-circle”(Thomas1923: 258).

Strongly influenced by Darwin’s ideas about evolution, the British anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917), and his American counterpart Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), both published important works in the 1870s arguing that human societies had evolved from a state of savagery (primitive hunting) through barbarism (simple farming) to civilization (the highest form of society). Morgan’s book, Ancient Society (1877), was partly based on his great knowledge of living Native Americans.

It was a French customs inspector, Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788–1868), working in the gravel quarries of the Somme river, who in 1841 pub-lished convincing evidence for the association there of human artifacts (of chipped stone, what we would today call “hand-axes” or “bifaces”) and the bones of extinct animals

In the same period, around 1675, the first archaeological excavation of the New World – a tunnel dug into Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Moon – was carried out by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora.

The main thing to remember is that every view of the past is a product of its own time: ideas and theories are constantly evolving, and so are methods.

It could be argued that the whole philosophy of archaeology is implied in the questions we ask and the form in which we frame them.

Chairman Mao coined the slogan “Let the past serve the present,” but that was sometimes used as an excuse for the deliberate destruction of ancient things.

surviving fragments of the Berlin Wall which once divided East from West Germany but which was opened and torn down in 1989.

Plotting the find sites on a map shows that these petrospheres were often located in the vicinity of Neolithic recumbent stone circles.

This painting was discovered in the Bulu Sipong cave on Sulawesi in 2016 and recent analysis has shown that it is the “oldest pictorial record of storytelling” and the “earliest figurative artwork in the world”, and is at least 43,900 years old. (The oldest known drawing in the world, a 73,000-year-old abstract scribble, was found in South Africa in 2018.)

Reverse engineering a bronze cannon from theLaBelleshipwreck

slighted to clear access to the drove way

Open to Exploration

The crayon, or perhaps more accurately “crayon-like object”, is 22-milimetres long and seven-millimetres wide, an elongated structure comprised primarily of haematitite, although with some small hard pieces of other minerals embedded.

ethics of video games in archaeology

The 74 pieces, acquired legally at the time by the former Spanish ambassador to Ecuador, were given to the Museo de América for restoration on the condition that they be returned when asked.

Peru seeks repatriation of 400 cultural artifacts from New York

A Historic Manuscript on Aztec Life Is “Virtually Repatriated

Cusco strike: Archaeology-concession decree repealed

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9,000-Year-Old Decapitated Skull Found under Amputated Hands

Ancient tunnels discovered underneath Mexican city of Puebla

How Peru is using drones to protect its archaeological treasures

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