Crimea, Goths and Archaeology The indigenous people of Crimea are generally regarded as the ‘Crimean Tartars’. But Crimea has older identities than that…. For example, the ‘Crimean Goths‘. The Goths were one of the identities on the move around Europe in the ‘Migration Period’. Their… Read more
In the mid 7th-century someone wrapped 411 objects in a cloth, and buried them in a pit, near what is now the Kursk region of Russia. They obviously never came back to get them, so presumably, things did not end well. The hoard was accidentally… Read more
What’s a guy to do during lock-down? I’ve chosen to time-travel back to around the first and second centuries AD. At that time the Roman Empire stretched over much of Europe, and along the southern Mediterranean as well. In two of its provinces, Noricum and… Read more
We don’t know what she looked like, because most of her upper body has vanished…. Most of you probably don’t know of my ‘secret’ ambition – to ‘time travel’ by recreating life-like images of people from long ago. I’m keen to know what those corroded… Read more
I’m no gamer, but….. ***** Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology is simply stunning. It’s task is to somehow present the bewildering range of peoples, cultures, languages which are, and have been, in this huge country. It does this in the range of usual ways:… Read more
The French woman had parted the curtains, and was peering out into the stormy night. *** There are up-sides and down-sides to travelling in the European winter – there are, of course, less tourists, but to compensate for this, the locals tend to shut up… Read more
In all my outings in Mongolia, I never saw a wolf – I only heard them howling while camping out one night (you can read about that here). Wolves, so I was told, are not a danger to humans – mostly. They are smart enough… Read more
‘Fox-holes’ perhaps? Did snipers crouch in these to fire down on an enemy below? What were these little rings of rocks strategically placed high up along the edges of central Turkish gorges? (see the featured image) How old are they? Fifty years? Five hundred? Five… Read more
You’ll see the chick with red and green silk bloomers at Tanais… The River Don is one of Europe’s big ones. Even if you haven’t heard of it, the sound should be somewhat familiar – there’s Danube, Dnieper, and the Dniester. They all contain the… Read more
Travelling in Russia last year I got a chance to see some of it’s famous prehistoric ‘Porthole Dolmens’. Now there is a solid dollop of ‘Atlantic facade’ DNA in me – i.e. Ireland and Scotland, and one of my pet fascinations is for the ‘megalithic… Read more