the urban prehistorian

It is not often I get angry, but a recent encounter with a standing stone has really annoyed – and shocked me. I am pretty used to prehistory being badly treated, and indeed a whole chapter of my forthcoming book (have I me...

One of the most remarkable episodes in British archaeology was played out in the summer of 1937 in Clydebank, near Glasgow. For a short while, the Druid Temple, or Knappers, was the hottest ticket in town and prehistory was sexy, thanks to the charismatic Ludovic MacLellan Mann. This site, long invisible, and in the shadow of Clydebank tower blocks, is one of my favourites. <...

I grew up in a town called Larkhall in South Lanarkshire, not far from Glasgow. It would be fair to say that this is a place that has a negative reputation at least in west central Scotland, and I was very aware of this when I was growing up. However the character of the town has ...

The most (in)famous example of heavy metal and prehistory harmonising is surely the undersized Stone’enge that is slowly lowered into the midst of guitars and spandex in the 1984 mock-rock-doc This is Spinal Tap. Confusion over inches and feet is an appropriate mistake to make for a monument that has so often in the past been boiled down to measurements and azimuths....