new ceremonial complex discovered

Given away by strange, crop-circle-like formations seen from the air, a huge prehistoric ceremonial complex discovered in southern England has taken archaeologists by surprise.

A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among "Britain's first architecture," according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project. For such a site to have lain hidden for so long is "completely amazing," said Wickstead, of Kingston University in London.

Archaeologist Joshua Pollard, who was not involved in the find, agreed. The discovery is "remarkable," he said, given the decades of intense archaeological attention to the greater Stonehenge region.

"I think everybody assumed such monument complexes were known about or had already been discovered," added Pollard, a co-leader of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which is funded in part by the National Geographic Society.

Swan pits dig diary

You may remember the media frenzy that was caused when the weird swan feather deposits were discovered.

Mysterious pits shed light on forgotten witches of the West

Since 2003, 35 pits at the site in a valley near Truro have been excavated containing swan pelts, dead magpies, unhatched eggs, quartz pebbles, human hair, fingernails and part of an iron cauldron.

The Saveock swan pits excavation has an online diary where you can catch up with the latest finds. Unfortunately it's not a proper blog so there's no feed to subscribe to, no comments, and no facility to link to individual posts. Though you can link to individual photos.

Anyway the really interesting thing is that the practices associated with the pits appear to have been going on from about the 1740s to the 1950s, according to the carbon-dating results:

The next pit we got a date for was the cat pit and that was over a hundred years later 1740’s to 1780’s which we were really pleased with because it meant that this particular belief system had been going on for at least four generations. Then we looked at the date for the dog pit and were completely taken aback! The dog had been alive since the 1950’s!!! It showed what they call ‘Bomb Carbon’ which is as a result of the thermo-nuclear bomb testing in the 1950’s. So we have over 350 years of this practice of depositing various bits of birds and animals in either north south or east west aligned pits in our valley.

I guess this isn't that surprising when you consider that some of the weird stuff they have in the Witchcraft Museum at Boscastle dates from as recently as the 1930s and 1940s.