Warrior Scarlet - Episode 22

Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff is a book set in the transition from Bronze to Iron Age, but that's the least interesting thing about it. I talk to Dr. Helen Chittock of the University of Oxford and Dr. Julia Farley of the British Museum about the history of archaeological theory as demonstrated by this book written in 1958.

Guests

Julia Farley @julia_farley; Helen Chittock @DrChittock
Host: Kim Biddulph @kimbiddulph

Links

• Warrior Scarlet
• Helen's project, Early Celtic Art in Context
• Julia's big Celts exhibition
• Gundestrup Cauldron
• Dunaverney flesh hook
• Wetwang Princess
• 'Celts' in western China

One Million Years BC to The Last Hunter - Episode 21

Take a few archaeologists who think they're film buffs and what have you got? A prehistoric film special! From fur bikinis to inter-species rape, we look at the best that we could find of a very small film genre with a sometimes critical and sometimes fond eye.

Links

• Article about evidence for Neanderthal cannibalism
• Article about possible artwork by Neanderthals in Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar
• Article about Neanderthals possibly using magnesium to start fires
• Article about Neanderthal and H. sapiens interbreeding
• Article about Neanderthal speech

Contact

• @kimbiddulph
• @mattpope Matthew Pope
• @alices_films Alice O'Mahoney

A Night in an Iron Age Hillfort - Episode 20

Kim Biddulph and friends spent the night in an Iron Age Hillfort sharing food, exchanging stories, and discussion ideas. It was an amazing night full of fun and excitement. The audio is a bit challenging at times, as you would expect it to be in this situation, but we've cleaned it up a bit and most should be OK.

Contact

• Kim Biddulph @kimbiddulph @schprehistory

Archer, Journey to Stonehenge - Episode 19

Jane Brayne has written and illustrated a comic strip style picture book on the journey of the Amesbury Archer, and kindly appears as a guest on the podcast to talk about it. The original excavator of the early Bronze Age burial the book is inspired by, Andrew Fitzpatrick, also talks about the background evidence for the book.

Links

• Buy Jane's book here
• Jane Brayne's website for Archer Journey to Stonehenge
• Jane's blog
• Andrew Fitzpatrick's profile page on Leicester University's website
• Link to Andrew's report on the Amesbury Archer
• Wessex Archaeology pages about the Amesbury Archer
• Page about the Amesbury Archer at Salisbury Museum, where he is on display

Contact

• Kim Biddulph @kimbiddulph @schprehistory
• Jane Brayne @SmallBoatBooks
• Andrew Fitzpatrick af215@le.ac.uk

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Mezolith - Episode 18

Mezolith is a graphic novel set loosely in the Mesolithic period (with shades of the Palaeolithic) somewhere in northern Europe. Written by Ben Haggarty, a storyteller steeped in legends of many cultures, which all come through in the book, and drawn by Adam Brockbank, an artist who has worked on X-Men and the Harry Potter films, it packs a punch stylistically but does the content match? Guests helping us decide this are Matt Ritchie from the Forestry Commission Scotland, John Swogger, archaeological comic artist and Erin Kavanagh, geomythologist and poet.

Links

• Link to Mezolith and Mezolith 2
• Information about the Vedbaek swan's wing burial
• Article about gender equality in hunter-gatherer groups
• Fishing spear found in Denmark featured in Mezolith
• Legend of Wayland the Smith used in Mezolith

Contact:

• Kim Biddulph
  • Twitter (@kimbiddulph, @schprehistory)
  • Prehistories Blog
• John Swogger
• Matt Ritchie
• Erin Kavanagh

Archaeological Comics - Episode 17

Show host Kim Biddulph talks to three archaeological comic writers and artists, John Swogger, Hannah Sackett and Katy Whitaker about their work and the current and potential uses of comics in archaeology. Comics are obviously a great way to engage children in archaeology, but can they be used beyond that?

Links:

• Katy Whitaker's Tale of the Toad Stone
• Hannah Sacket's Mold Gold Cape
• John Swogger's Çatalhöyük comic
• Research at Sheffield Hallam University on the use of comics for learning

Contact:

Kim Biddulph
Twitter (@kimbiddulph, @schprehistory)
Prehistories Blog

Hannah Sackett
Twitter (@DrHcomics)
The "Other" Prehistories Blog

Katy Whitaker
Twitter (@artefactual_kw)
Artefactual Blog

John Swogger, blog

The First Drawing and Stone Age Boy - Episode 16

Two children's picturebooks are the subject of episode 16 of Prehi/stories. Picturebooks may be the first contact children have with prehistory, so we're looking at how two of the best, The First Drawing by Mordicai Gerstein and Stone Age Boy by Satoshi Kitamura, represent the remote past. In this episode my guests are Ghislaine Howard, a painter of powerful and expressive means whose works chart and interpret shared human experience. Her drawing Pregnant Self Portrait 1987 was part of the British Museum's exhibition Ice Age Art: arrival of the modern mind in 2013. I also talk to Andrew Needham, Associate Lecturer in Palaeolithic Archaeology and Post-Doctoral researcher on the Templeton funded 'Hidden Depths: The Ancestry of our Most Human Emotions' project at the University of York.

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LINKS:

A short film, Ice Age Art: The Female Gaze, featuring Ghislaine Howard can be found at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2hv2ssmB_MU

Ghislaine Howard: The Human Touch, Paintings Drawings and Prints 1980-2016, published by Manchester School of Art in association with Martin Heaps on March 16th 2017. For further information contact raffi@collectart.co.uk or visit www.ghislainehoward.com

Some of the following may be behind a paywall, but some are open access.
Women and Children in art
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10816-015-9265-8
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/div-classtitleevidence-for-cave-marking-by-palaeolithic-childrendiv/091A61EF12E5E703412D3CE9A49568DA
http://www.jstor.org/stable/43184971?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ojoa.12052/abstract

Pal Art beyond Europe
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313000757
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027737911630508X
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7521/full/nature13422.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248409000207
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/334/6053/219

Early Pal domestication of the dog
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879981716301127
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440311003499

Neanderthal art
http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-made-some-of-europe-s-oldest-art-1.15805
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/37/13301.full
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/1023.full

Contact:

@kimbiddulph @schprehistory
Andrew Needham @andyneedhamarch
https://www.york.ac.uk/archaeology/research/research-students/needham/
http://york.academia.edu/AndyNeedham
Ghislaine Howard @ghislainehoward @ghislainehowar4
http://ghislainehoward.com/

The Inheritors - Episode 15

Matthew Pope of UCL and Beccy Scott of the British Museum shed light on the extraordinary tale of the Neanderthal Lok and his extended family written by William Golding. Given the topic of Golding's more famous work, Lord of the Flies, it's not surprising that things get a bit vicious in this book too when some other kind of humans turn up. But were our ancestors really that vile?

LINKS:

• William Golding's The Inheritors
• BBC article linking to journal articles about Neanderthal art, burial and adornment

Contacts

• Kim Biddulph
  • @kimbiddulph
    • @schprehistory