the urban prehistorian

The excavation of Camphill enclosure in Queen’s Park, Glasgow, in the late summer of 2026 was an exercise in trying to demonstrate that this extensive monument could, just possibly, be Iron Age.

What is bunkerology?

It is not often I get angry, but a recent encounter with a standing stone has really annoyed – and shocked me.

In the name of relaxation, would you like a small cup-and-ring marked stone to be gently rubbed back and forth against your jowls like this gentleman?

One of the most remarkable episodes in British archaeology was played out in the summer of 1937 in Clydebank, near Glasgow.

I grew up in a town called Larkhall in South Lanarkshire, not far from Glasgow.

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.

Urban prehistory can still surprise me.

What else would we be going to look at on a suburban street called Helleristningen, other than what this Norwegian word means: the rock carving.

Me, tracing my fingers in and out of the coarse surface of cupmarks on a stone in the sun, with red paint marks on the rock beside me.

“Why does that Wetherspoons have a drawing of a standing stone outside?”