The Mghvimevi engravings, located in Georgia, are the most ancient rock art discovered in the South Caucasus, dating back to the Upper Paleolithic. They were first discovered by archaeologist S. Zamyatnyn in 1934. However, misinterpretations in the scientific literature later led to the petroglyphs being considered lost or destroyed. In 2022, they were rediscovered by the authors of this blog.

Even though the Vlaardingen people inhabited a wetland landscape, well preserved wooden artefacts are a rare find. One of these exceptions to the general rule is a wooden object on display at the Vlaardingen Museum. The card in the exhibition states that this is a digging stick, a plausible interpretation of this object. It is a 61 cm long wooden stick, oblong in profile and slightly bent with a clear knob and a shiny, polished edge at the tip. The top 20 cm or so show a clear polish, probably of being held in the hand.

My colleague, Dr. Zech Jinks-Fredrick, and myself, Chris Busuttil, decided to embark on a project of discovery. Our project was designed as a control experiment to determine the feasibility of re-smelting iron scrap in a prehistoric furnace. This topic has been widely debated within the British archaeological community, especially in conversations regarding the motives of hoarding iron objects. 

I have been interested in prehistory for a long time and as an educator and a provider of school workshops decided it was time to combine these aspects and embark on a new project – a Stone Age workshop exploring life back then and the changes through the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic. So currently I am working on creating a set of artefacts to illustrate Stone Age life, as we currently understand it, based on archaeological evidence (mainly from Northern Europe) with resources that can be handled by children and are made (as far as I can) using time appropriate techniques.

Neanderthal clothing is something that’s being discussed more and more by archaeologists at the moment, with people now generally agreeing that clothing was needed by many of these early people to survive the often-harsh environmental conditions at the time. Unfortunately, we don’t have much evidence to tell us what this clothing might have looked like – with most clothing likely made of organic material such as animal skins, it has long disappeared.