The ‘Lost’ Church of Bix Gibwyn: The Human Bone

Recent research for the Victoria County History (VCH) highlighted the presence of a ‘lost’ medieval church in Bix, a Chilterns parish north-west of Henley-on-Thames. The building, formerly the parish church of Bix Gibwyn, was abandoned in the late sixteenth or seventeenth century and has left no standing remains. Archaeological investigation by the South Oxfordshire Archaeological Group (SOAG) and Reading University has confirmed its location in a close called ‘Old Chapel’ in Bix Bottom, in the north of the parish. The rediscovery of the site – which contains the foundations of a hitherto unknown Romano-British stone building – sheds new light on long-term changes in local communications, settlement, and economic conditions. In the Middle Ages Bix Gibwyn church was a focus of religious and social life for a small rural community in the south Oxfordshire Chilterns. After the Reformation it was neglected, demolished, and finally all but forgotten. Its location has been a matter of speculation for over a hundred years,1 but in 2007–10 its churchyard was identified through a combination of historical research and archaeological fieldwork. Confirmation of the church’s location in the remote Bix Bottom valley provides important evidence about the medieval settlement pattern in Bix, which was very different from the modern one, and offers an opportunity to reassess the development of settlement in the southern Chilterns more generally. The archaeological findings also supply new evidence about Roman activity in the area

The known unknown : identification, provenancing, and relocation of pieces of decorative architecture from Roman public buildings and other private structures in Malta

In archaeology a narrative or story is usually reconstructed on the basis of a meticulous study of material. In normal circumstances, the physical material constitutes the known, while the actual story remains the unknown until the material is deciphered and put in context. When it comes to certain aspects of Roman architecture in Malta, and especially the architecture of public buildings, the story is somewhat reversed. This is because we know of the presence of public buildings but the actual physical evidence of such structures has for long remained unknown. This study seeks to provide a story, one that gives a provenance to some of the most important architectural elements found in various local collections, thereby bringing to the attention of researchers a corpus of data that has hitherto been little known.peer-reviewe

Ggantija and the surrounding lands : insights through a late eighteenth-century contract

The deed through which Giovanni Battista Cassar Desain protected Ggantija is described and possible reasons behind his decision discussed. A plan accompanying the contract has been utilised to throw light on Ggantija and the surrounding late eighteenth-century landscape. Relevant contemporary representations are analysed to throw light on the state of Ggantija before the clearances of the 1820s. Caves, an underground spring, and a forgotten path have been rediscovered, highlighting the fact that the area remains largely unexplored.peer-reviewe

The Old Farmhouse, Blashenwell, Corfe Castle, Dorset. Archaeological Assessment.

An archaeological assessment was carried out at the Old Farmhouse, Blashenwell, prior to building work at the site. The farmhouse is situated in an area rich in archaeological deposits dating from the Mesolithic through to the medieval period. A comprehensive watching brief was recommended during all ground disturbance and associated structural work

Tradition, time and narrative : rethinking the Late Neolithic of the Maltese Islands

This paper reconsiders the Late Neolithic of the Maltese Islands from a broader perspective. It argues that the prevailing narrative centred on passzvely inherited cultural baggage obscures the dynamic narrative created by the ancient inhabitants. It is argued that a fuller understanding of the period requires an engagement with concepts of time and tradition, which are seen here on multiple scales. This enables a fuller reading of the period, particularly in terms of how people created and redefined time.peer-reviewe

Excavation at Aguas Buenas, Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile, of a gunpowder magazine and the supposed campsite of Alexander Selkirk, together with an account of early navigational dividers

Excavations were undertaken of a ruined building at Aguas Buenas, identified as an 18th-century Spanish gunpowder magazine. Evidence was also found for the campsite of an early European occupant of the island. A case is made that this was Alexander Selkirk, a castaway here from 1704 to 1709. Selkirk was the model for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. A detailed discussion is given of a fragment of copper alloy identifi ed as being from a pair of navigational dividers

Community-driven approaches to open source archaeological imaging

No abstract available

The Fourth-Century AD Expansion of the Graeco-Roman Settlement of Karanis (Kom Aushim) in the Northern Fayum*

The Graeco-Roman town of Karanis, founded during the Ptolemaic Period in the north-eastern Fayum in the third century bc and long thought to have been abandoned in the third century ad actually saw a substantial expansion during the fourth century AD. With the creation of an 3 extension towards the west and the expansion of the eastern part, the town grew in both directions. We argue that this expansion may be related to a sudden rise of the water level in Lake Moeris (Lake Qarun), perhaps linked to a catastrophic dam breach in the eastern part of the Fayum, and the subsequent relocation of the inhabitants of the low-lying settlements north and east of the lake

Achieving interoperability between the CARARE schema for monuments and sites and the Europeana Data Model

Mapping between different data models in a data aggregation context always presents significant interoperability challenges. In this paper, we describe the challenges faced and solutions developed when mapping the CARARE schema designed for archaeological and architectural monuments and sites to the Europeana Data Model (EDM), a model based on Linked Data principles, for the purpose of integrating more than two million metadata records from national monument collections and databases across Europe into the Europeana digital library.Comment: The final version of this paper is openly published in the proceedings of the Dublin Core 2013 conference, see http://dcevents.dublincore.org/IntConf/dc-2013/paper/view/17

Towton, 1461: An integrated approach to battlefield archaeology

Ye