King Arthur has made his mark on Britain’s landscape, and not surprisingly left his name on numerous ancient sites. Here, Dave Weldrake considers Arthur’s relationship with Round Tables and maidens… Arthurian place names A lot of time and effort has been spent on trying to site the battles of King Arthur. (See for instance Alcock …
Should we take seriously legends about ‘retribution’ coming to humans who violate ritual sites? Robert W E Farrah has been wondering the same thing… It was during the campaign to stop a Christian ‘Millennium Monument’ being erected in the vicinity of Mayburgh henge (see NE 84 and 85) that I was reminded that my own …
Richard Thornhill on the strange shenanigans that made a man into a god in ancient Japan, and a legend that recalls Britain’s ‘screaming skulls’ and Lleu Llaw Gyffes As I cycle to work through the Otemachi banking district of central Tokyo, I pass the Masakado Kubizuka (‘Masakado Head-Mound’), a little square of garden, with a …
John Palmer introduces a sacred site in an unfamiliar territory to NE readers Perhaps the best-known ancient sacred site in Romania is the circular temple observatory and quadrangular sanctuary (one of seven, two of which are circular) of Sarmizegetusa Regia in Thrace – this was known in Roman times as Dacia, the ‘capital’ of Dacia …
Hawaiian petroglyphs and the general cultural sanctification of stones in parts of Polynesia have not received a great deal of attention in British earth mysteries magazines, but Graeme Chappell’s report on the carvings he and Paul Bennett located in Northumberland
Much press and public attention has attended discovery of an ancient site in Miami, Florida, dubbed with typical media disdain for fact as an American Stonehenge. Christine Rhone summarises the findings The Miami Circle was discovered in late 1998 through a routine investigation by urban archaeologists of a plot of land on the S shore …
William Glyn-Jones takes another look at an ancient image in Crete The Bull Leaper fresco from the palace of Knossos in Crete has always been a particular favourite of mine. The graceful power of the bull, with its sensuous flowing curves, the lithe beauty of the dark-limbed dancers, and the overall sense of movement combine …
Japan’s indigenous quasi-pagan religion, Shinto, has preserved sacred space in city and countryside, in many cases since prehistory, and the result is some of the most powerfully numinous places that one will encounter. Here, Richard Thornhill writes of such a shrine in one of the world’s most urbanised environments Hakusan Jinja is considered one of …
Christine Rhone introduces some of the lesser-known antiquities of the USA Paleo-Indians The work of anthropologist Louis Leakey turns the tables on our usual concepts of New World and Old. Worked stones in the Moiave Desert would indicate human occupation in North America 200,000 years ago, among the earliest anywhere in the world. By …