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UK police have arrested five men, including four Iranian nationals, on suspicion of “terrorism offences”, police have said. The arrests were carried out in London, Swindon and the Greater Manchester area and were related to “a suspected plot to target a specific premises”, London’s Metropolitan police said in a statement. The men, aged between 29 and 46, were arrested on suspicion of “preparation of a terrorist act” and remain in custody, the police said. The nationality of one of the men was still being established, they said. Counter-terrorism police had been in contact with the site allegedly targeted to make...

The site of a kiln that was used in the building of Roman Britain's second-largest town is being excavated.Archaeologists and volunteers have spent some of the past three years working to uncover more of the kiln, which they have said was used to build Cirencester, in Gloucestershire, and other places.Tiles from the site at Brandier, a tiny hamlet near Minety in Wiltshire, have markings found on artefacts over a large area - as far as Old Sarum, near Hereford, the Cotswolds and Reading...Neil Holbrook - CEO of Cotswold Archaeology which is running the dig - explained that 200 years ago...

A researcher in England has uncovered a copy of the original photograph featured on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV —and revealed the identity of its subject. ... more than 50 years after the album’s release, Brian Edwards, a historian at the University of the West of England, discovered an original copy of the image while perusing auction house news releases on the internet, according to the Guardian’s Nadia Khomami. Edwards is also a big Led Zeppelin fan, so when he came across a Victorian photo album that included the image of the stick man, he instantly recognized it. The...

In this video, I visit Avebury Henge and Stone Circle ... the largest in the world 🤩 Built and much altered during the Neolithic period, roughly between 2850 BC and 2200 BC, the henge survives as a huge circular bank and ditch, encircling an area that includes part of Avebury village. Within the henge is the largest stone circle in Britain - originally of about 100 stones - which in turn encloses two smaller stone circles.The history books state it was built for ceremonial purposes, but they forget to take into account the geological data. If they did, they would...

Exactly 52 years after the release of Led Zeppelin’s fourth studio album—widely referred to as Led Zeppelin IV—the identity of the man gracing its cover has been revealed, The Guardian and The New York Times report. The cover artwork famously features an elderly man hinged at the waist, weighed down by a bale of long twigs strapped to his back. Now, a research fellow in South West England named Brian Edwards has discovered that the original source of the scene: a late Victorian era photograph of a Wiltshire thatcher named Lot Long. A visiting research fellow with the regional history...

NEWDigging Band of Brothers:Time Team Special with Tony Robinson (2023)- FULL EPISODE | 1:36:56Time Team Official | 187K subscribers587,149 views | Premiered September 30, 2023

The authors combine pollen, spores, sedimentary DNA, and animal remains to characterize the pre-Neolithic habitat of the site, inferring partially open woodland conditions, which would have been beneficial to large grazing herbivores like aurochs, as well as hunter-gatherer communities. This study supports previous evidence that the Stonehenge region was not covered in closed canopy forest at this time, as has previously been proposed.This study also provides date estimates for human activity at Blick Mead. Results indicate that hunter-gatherers used this site for 4,000 years up until the time of the earliest known farmers and monument-builders in the region, who would...

A mutli-isotope analysis of pigs remains found around henge complexes near Stonehenge has revealed the large extent and scale of movements of human communities in Britain during the Late Neolithic. The findings... provide insight into more than a century of debate surrounding the origins of people and animals in the Stonehenge landscape. Neolithic henge complexes, located in southern Britain, have long been studied for their role as ceremonial centers. Feasts that were unprecedented at the time were held at these locations. Experts have theorized that these events brought in many people beyond the surrounding area of the henge sites, but...

Stone tools found in a 4,000-year-old grave near Stonehenge have traces of gold on their surfaces that indicate they were used to fashion gold ornaments. In 1801, archaeologists found the assemblage of Bronze Age artifacts, including the stone tools, in a barrow or burial mound from about 1800 B.C. near the village of Upton Lovell, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) west of Stonehenge. The assemblage(opens in new tab) includes flint axes, a necklace of beads of polished stone and dozens of bone points — possibly from another necklace and the fringe of a garment. The collection, which is now on...

Three metal detector fans have discovered a Roman hoard worth tens of thousands of pounds while spending the weekend camping in south-west England.The group were staying in a field near the ancient village of Pewsey, in Wiltshire, when they found the treasure trove a mere six paces from where they had pitched their tent.Robert Abbott, 53, switched on his device after breakfast one morning and very quickly found something.At first the computer shop owner from Essex, near London, uncovered only discarded metal tent pegs. But he dug a little deeper and hidden below was a valuable silver Roman coin called...

Scientists have uncovered evidence for a large-scale, prehistoric migration into Britain that may be linked to the spread of Celtic languages. The mass-movement of people originated in continental Europe and occurred between 1,400 BC and 870 BC. The discovery helps to explain the genetic make-up of many present-day people in Britain. Around half the ancestry of later populations in England and Wales comes from these migrants. ...When the newcomers arrived, the existing British population traced most of its ancestry to people who arrived at the end of the Neolithic, around the time Stonehenge was being built. They were part of...

...a series of deep pits were discovered near the world heritage site of Stonehenge last year... Now scientific tests have proved that those gaping pits, each aligned to form a circle spanning 1.2 miles (2km) in diameter, were definitely human-made, dug into the sacred landscape almost 4,500 years ago. The structure appears to have been a boundary guiding people to a sacred area, because Durrington Walls, one of Britain’s largest henge monuments, is located precisely at its centre. The site is 1.9 miles north-east of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, near Amesbury in Wiltshire... While part of the circle has not...

He had been sent to the auction by his wife, so legend has it, to buy a set of dining chairs. Instead, barrister Cecil Chubb’s eye was caught by lot No 15: a few acres of Wiltshire downland – plus one ancient, crumbling, mysterious monument. Exactly 100 years ago, Stonehenge was sold to Chubb for £6,600. Three years later he gave the magnificent stones to the nation and since then it has become one of the most beloved and most visited historical sites in the world.

Full Headline: Return of the death mound: Neolithic-style tombs are back in fashion after 5,000 years as Britain runs out of space to bury the dead These stunning images show the Milky Way etched across the night sky over a Neolithic burial barrow, which will open this weekend as part of a Stone Age tradition being resurrected across Britain. The Soulton Long Barrow in Shropshire is only the third of its kind to be opened in modern times. The burial chamber is based on ancient solution to the lack of burial space in Britain used by our Neolithic ancestors almost...

Researchers have shown that cremated humans at Stonehenge were from the same region of Wales as the stones used in construction. The key innovation was finding that high temperatures of cremation can crystallise a skull, locking in the chemical signal of its origin. The first long-term residents of Stonehenge, along with the first stones, arrived about 5,000 years ago. While it is already known that the "bluestones" that were first used to build Stonehenge were transported from 150 miles (240 km) away in modern-day Pembrokeshire, almost nothing is known about the people involved. The scientists' work shows that both people...

"A man and a woman found unconscious in Wiltshire were poisoned by Novichok-the same nerve agent that poisoned ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal, police say" BBC News story published at around 6pm Eastern-2300 British Summer Time 7/4/2018 Last Saturday in Amesbury, England Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess became ill and went unconscious. Soon workers in hazmat suits were in the area. At first police thought it might be a drug related incident. First media reports appeared this morning with the words "mysterious substance" attached to what caused the pair to go unconscious. But late tonight in the UK "Novichok" was identified...

A man and a woman found unconscious in Wiltshire were poisoned by Novichok, the same nerve agent as ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal, police say. The couple, believed to be Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess, are in a critical condition having been found unconscious at a house on Saturday. Police say no one else has presented the same symptoms. There was "nothing in their background" to suggest the pair were targeted, the Met Police said.... Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said it could not be confirmed whether the nerve agent came from the same batch that Mr. Skripal, and his...

One theory is that the top of the hill was lopped off around the time of the Battle of Hastings or even earlier.

A powerful group of senior archaeologists are sharpening their trowels to fight "ethically unacceptable" plans they say will destroy one of the nation's greatest Iron Age treasures. Old Oswestry Hill Fort, an imposing ancient feature that dominates the skyline on the fringe of the Shropshire market town, is on the frontline of an increasingly bitter struggle pitting historians and residents against the local authority and central government. At stake is the ancient rural surroundings of the hill fort, an elaborate, 3,000-year-old earthwork dubbed "the Stonehenge of the Iron Age". It is said to have been the birthplace of Queen Ganhumara...

Jim Leary, the archaeological director for English Heritage throughout the work, thinks he has solved a riddle which archaeologists have fretted over for centuries: why thousands of people piled up 35 million baskets of chalk into the largest artificial hill in Europe, now part of the Stonehenge World Heritage site. It wasn't the final structure, but the staggering contribution of work which was important, he now believes, marking a site of immense but only guessable significance to the hunters and farmers of Bronze Age Wiltshire... the archaeologists and engineers are convinced there is no secret chamber, prehistoric passage or treasure...