Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Archaeological News

How cool: an award-winning site that brings me all the daily news in archaeology . . . kind of like yahoo used to do. The site is called Archaeologica.com, and here is the page that displays the daily news.

How else would I learn about a Colchester grave that may turn out to be the first druid grave ever found? Archaeologica has a link to that story in The Independent--but don't bother. Go
right to the source instead: British Archaeology magazine has the story online here.

The 1st century AD grave, excavated in 1996, is at Camoludunum. It contains a set of surgical instruments and a game board with glass pieces set up for play. If that sounds familiar, you may have read about the grave in published books about the Celts (Peter Beresford Ellis mentioned the find, I think).

Discovery also covered this in February. (isn't Google great?) That's where this picture came from, but the story on Discovery.com has a larger version of the picture and a map--this is just a bit of a tease.

Of course, labeling this a druid grave is all based on the assumption that only druids practiced surgery and played board games, which is a bit of a stretch. But it looks good on paper.

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