Wednesday 17 June 2009

Yorkshire treasure stash unearthed after 1,000 years

MORE than a thousand years ago a Saxon thief, desperate to hide his plunder, stashed a hoard of stolen gold in what is today a nondescript West Yorkshire field.

What became of the thief is lost to the ages and his precious loot lay safely buried in that same field for the next millennium.

There it remained until a treasure hunter, out with his trusty metal detector last year, experienced the moment he will never forget when he unearthed the amazing find on the farmland near Leeds.

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Ancient burial site found at Boscastle

AN ANCIENT burial site dating from the Dark Ages has been discovered at Boscastle during work to create a new waste water scheme for the area.

A pagan and Christian cemetery, including at least 18 graves, was unearthed during the setting up of a compound.

The discovery prompted South West Water (SWW) to call in experts to help understand the significance of the find.

Experts said the particular type of graves found were extremely rare.

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Sunday 14 June 2009

Students unearth Saxon nunnery

Archaeologists believe they could have found the first-ever excavated Saxon nunnery, on a dig in Gloucestershire.

The annual dig, by the University of Bristol, has unearthed remains of a Saxon building in the grounds of the Edward Jenner Museum, Berkeley.

The Berkeley Project to find Saxon Berkeley and the missing nunnery has been going for five years.

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Frühmittelalterliche Sonnenuhr aus dem Neusser Kloster St. Quirin

Eine Sonnenuhr des 9.-10. Jahrhunderts aus dem ehemaligen Kloster St. Quirin in Neuss konnte jetzt anhand von archäologischen Fragmenten rekonstruiert und nachgebaut werden. Bislang sind in Europa nur sehr wenige Uhren aus dieser Zeit bekannt geworden.

Die drei Kalksteinbruchstücke des Zeitmessers wurden in den 1960er Jahren bei Ausgrabungen auf dem ehemaligen Klosterareal entdeckt und ursprünglich für römische Spolien gehalten. Erst kürzlich konnten sie als Teile einer hochmittelalterlichen Sonnenuhr identifiziert werden. Die Ausgrabungen, die seinerzeit auf dem Gelände um das Kloster und spätere Stift St. Quirin durchgeführt wurden, werden derzeit in einem Forschungsprojekt des Institut für Vor- und Frühgeschichtliche Archäologie und Provinzialrömische Archäologie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München am LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn ausgewertet.

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Wednesday 10 June 2009

Wearmouth-Jarrow Nomination For World Heritage Site

The twin Anglo-Saxon monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in northeast England will be the UK’s nomination for World Heritage Site status in 2010. The monastery, which functioned as ‘one monastery in two places’, is centred on St Peter’s Church in Wearmouth, Sunderland and St Paul’s Church in Jarrow.

Wearmouth-Jarrow was a major international centre of learning and culture in the 7th and 8th centuries. Its most famous inhabitant, the Venerable Bede, was the greatest scholar of his day and the impact of his writings is still felt in the 21st century. Original and rare 7th-century architectural and archaeological remains of the monastery survive at both Wearmouth and Jarrow.

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Saturday 6 June 2009

The Saxons were coming! A tiny sword stud found under a shop rewrites Welsh history

AT BARELY a centimetre across and almost unrecognisable after centuries underground, it may not look much, but could shed light on an almost unknown era of Welsh history.

The discovery of a sword stud beneath shops in Monmouth, made public for the first time in today’s Western Mail, could be evidence of an Anglo-Saxon period settlement.

But now there are concerns the site where it was found may be destroyed by development.

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Thursday 4 June 2009

The Viking and Anglo-Saxon Landscape and Economy (VASLE) Project

In the last fifteen years the role of metal-detected objects in the study of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian England has greatly increased through reporting to the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) and the Early Medieval Corpus (EMC). There are now thousands more artefacts and coins known than a decade ago which, in conjunction with fieldwork, have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of the early medieval period.

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