maggietrainor23

A black and white ink drawing of the neolithic tomb known as Wayland's Smithy

This is my ink drawing of Wayland's Smithy, a Neolithic long barrow close to the Ridgeway in Oxfordshire. It is said that if you leave your horse there with a coin then Wayland will magically reshoe it.
The original artwork is now available on my Etsy shop here: shorturl.at/HDzSI
#TombTuesday

Bø-Elveterrassen: This very pretty and well-preserved barrow cemetery #TombTuesday is located about 100km SW of Oslo on a flat natural terrace overlooking the Lågen river to the east.

A hillside made up of patchwork fields and hedges with a round barrow at the bottom of the valley and several on the ridge above

Isn't Wiltshire amazing - five Bronze Age round barrows in one image! See if you can spot them all...

#TombTuesday

📸 Mine

#archaeology #ancientbluesky #photooftheday 🏺

Roof tile of the Sixth Legion from Roman York (Eboracum). The Sixth replaced the Ninth Legion at York in around AD 122. The tile is part of the museum collections at York Minster. 📸 My own. #TilesOnTuesday #RomanBritain #York

Caption “Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry” exhibition - “In the spring of 1382, Jean de Berry obtained permission from the Duke of Girona, his relative, to send three craftsmen from the Valencia region to Spain to work, under the leadership of Jean de Valence, on the construction sites of his fabulous castle of Mehun-sur-Yivre, as well as on those of the palaces of Bourges and Poitiers. The innovative program consisted of decorating the state rooms and apartments with armorial floors made of earthenware tiles produced locally, thanks to the temporary importation of this expertise, then unknown in France”.

“Bear with a banner” medieval tile -
14th Century

In 1382, Jean de Berry employed Spanish craftsmen to decorate his residences with armorial floor tiles at Mehun-sur-Yivre, Bourges & Poitiers. A skill then unknown in France.

#TilesOnTuesday

Image of the Crannog textile, collage of textile-making Roman and Iron Age tools

Image of the Crannog textile, collage of textile-making Roman and Iron Age tools

A rare Iron Age textile from Loch Tay preserved for thousands of years & thought to be the earliest of its kind - Scottish Crannog Centre - 📷 ©A. Palyvos.
Textile-making tools found at Trimontium 📷 ©NMS & TrimontiumTrust.

This weekend don't miss our Iron Age Textiles Workshop! zurl.co/AntJr

Please enjoy 10 seconds of a fat groundhog enjoying an apple at my sister's house 😊

My photo shows a polychrome mosaic depicting Mediterranean marine life using earthy-coloured tesserae (mosaic tiles) against a black tessarae background. At the centre of the mosaic is a pale-coloured octopus composed of off-white and light brown tesserae with some of its writhing tentacles wrapped around the body of a lobster composed of light red, and pinky-brown tesserae. The octopus has an egg shaped body/head and it stares at the viewer with large eyes made of brown and pink circles with black centres. The octopus and lobster are surrounded by various species of large and small Mediterranean fish and a mollusc, including an eel and a flat fish. On the left hand side of the scene there is a small kingfisher bird on top of a rock. Some of the fish appear to be watching the fight between the octopus and the lobster This mosaic comes from the House of the Geometric Mosaics in Pompeii. Now on display at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

Spectacular googly-eyed octopus does battle with a lobster in this 2,000 year-old Roman mosaic from Pompeii! 🐙 🦞

Fantastic fishy onlookers too! 👀

From the House of the Geometric Mosaics. Now at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.
📷 by me

#MosaicMonday
#Archaeology

A pile of small glass mosaic cubes in shades of blue, green, and yellow, on a white surface.

#MosaicMonday: colourful #Roman glass tesserae found in Geneva/Switzerland, dating 3rd/4th c. AD. 

Mosaic cubes were made of stone, pottery, tile, or glass. Glass tesserae were rather fragile. They were used rather rarely in floor mosaics to provide colours that...🧵1/2

#archaeology 🏺

A collage of wildflowers including ox-eye daisies, yellow common toadflax, pink yarrow, dandelion, pink bramble blossom, a small violet-blue ivy-leaved toadflax bloom, purple creeping thistle, a globe-shaped ivy flower with bee, and a white hogweed umbellifer, all photographed against soft green backgrounds.

Wildflowers found still merrily blooming on the last weekend of September: ox-eye daisies, common toadflax, yarrow, dandelion, bramble flowers, ivy-leaved toadflax, creeping thistle, ivy flowers and hogweed. #WildflowerHour #nature

Close-up photograph of hooded flowers of White dead nettle.

White dead nettle flowering in Ely this afternoon. #WildflowerHour

By the field's edge, a beech copse on a sunlit autumn afternoon

The leaves of this beech are beginning to brown, its nuts ripening inside their bristly husks ... Full autumn in Warden #Northumberland
#wildflowerhour @bsbibotany.bsky.social

A road across a narrow waterway, with a large standing stone standing on the left

#StandingStoneSunday The causeway across the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney, guarded by the 'Watchstone'

This probably-Neolithic stone may have once been part of a pair, guarding the processional route from the Stones of Stenness

📸 Mine

#archaeology #ancientbluesky #scotland #photooftheday 🏺

Lower courses of stone built wall with foundations of projecting tower on the right and internal square tower to the left. Surrounded by grass. Trees in the background

Squared facing stones of a Roman wall with rubble core exposed. Grass in foreground, trees and sky behind

Interpretation board set up to explain the Roman walls of Cirencester

A short section of the late 3rd century AD stone wall encircling the #Roman Town of CORINIVM DOBVNNORVM (Cirencester) with projecting polygonal tower

Originally extending for 2 miles (3.2 km), enclosing an area of 240 acres (97 ha), this is the only bit exposed today

📷 Oct 2025

#RomanSiteSaturday

Druids Circle (Penmaenmawr): This fantastic ring of around 30 stones #StandingStoneSunday stands on the headland of Penmaenmawr above Conwy, close to a prehistoric trackway and three other stone circles.

Long Meg, a witch turned to stone, stands next to her many stony-hearted daughters (or, alternatively, her lovers or her fellow witches). If you break bits off her, she will bleed. A wonderful stone decorated with rock art, she marks the direction of winter solstice sunset. #StandingStoneSunday

Museo Egizio Turin photo showing a small, dark-blue, core-formed, round glass jar which tapers in at the shoulders below the neck. It has yellow, white, and light blue festoon decoration trailed around the main body. There is a single yellow trail just below the neck of the jar. There is a dark-blue circular glass lid, the top of which is adorned with two dark-blue duck heads with yellow bills, a yellow trailed stripe on the top of each duck’s head, and indents for their eyes. The jar is displayed on a perspex (?) stand against a grey background. Glass jar dimensions: 7.6 cm x 9.6 cm. Core-forming is one of the earliest glassmaking techniques. Glassmakers shaped the body of the vessel around a core, wound colored trails around it. They then let the vessel cool and removed the core.

A 3,500 year-old Egyptian glass cosmetic jar with two little duck heads!

Glass was a relatively new material at that time, so this jar would have been a precious possession.

From Merit’s beauty case, found inside Theban tomb (TT8) of Merit and her husband Kha in 1906. 📷 Museo Egizio

#Archaeology

A metal face mask from a #Roman cavalry helmet; the blank expression is quite off-putting even now, & must have been pretty intimidating in antiquity (whether or not they were ever worn in battle) 🏺 #AncientBlueSky

Multi-generational vulture nests hold 700 years of human artifacts Crossbow bolts, sandals, slingshots, and more.

super cool study found human artifacts in Bearded vulture nests, incl. "weaponry like a crossbow bolt and wooden lance, decorated sheep leather, and parts of a slingshot....a shoe made from twigs and grass is ~675-years-old." link to paper: doi.org/10.1002/ecy..... www.popsci.com/environment/... 🧪🌍🦉

The remains of the Roman amphitheater at Cirencester (Corinium). Built during the 2nd century AD, it is estimated that the amphitheater would have held around 8000 people. 📸 My own. #RomanSiteSaturday #RomanBritain #Cirencester

The photo shows a wooden model of a cow giving birth accompanied by two men. One man calms the cow while the other ensures a proper delivery.The calf emerges from his mother, licking the hand of the man.

Models of everyday life were deposited in #Egyptian tombs. They were supposed to support the deceased in the afterlife. One of the most charming examples is the model of a #cow giving birth.
Carved in wood, painted.
Probably from Meir, #Egypt, dating c. 2040-1985 BC.

📷 Royal Ontario Museum

🏺

A three-panel digital illustration showing the archaeological process of residue analysis. In the first panel, a clay pot sits over a small fire surrounded by stones. In the second, a broken pot is uncovered in the ground with a trowel nearby. In the third, gloved hands hold a sherd and take a sample with a small tool. Two circles highlight what residue analysis can reveal: plant grains and a goat

day 3 of #archink2025: residue. what's left inside a pot can say a lot. grains, fats, traces of meals long gone.
drew that chain in a kind of comic style: pot in use, pot buried/excavated, pot in the lab.

Small remains lead to past recipes.

#archInk #archaeology

Met Museum photo of an Ancient Egyptian gold head ornament viewed from the front against a grey background. The headband is made of hammered sheet gold, the ends of which have been tapered to a narrower width and rolled to form loops. A string would have threaded through the loops to fasten the band around the head at the back. The front of the band is decorated with a central head of an antlered stag, identified as the Persian fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica). The stag has two large antlers, large ears and a triangular-shaped head. It is flanked on either side by two gazelle heads. The gazelle heads have long ears and long curved horns which point outwards at the tip. Between the animal heads are four 8-pointed flowers or stars. Dimensions: height of central stag 8.9, length of headband 49.5 cm. Dated to the Second Intermediate period (c. 1648-1540 BC) when northern Egypt was ruled by the Hyksos from the ancient Near East. Said to be part of a group of objects found in the Eastern Delta near Avaris, the Hyksos capital. The headband shows a mix of ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian artistic styles.

Something lovely for the weekend!

Ancient Egyptian gold headband decorated with heads of gazelles and a stag between stars or flowers. Second Intermediate (Hyksos) period, Dynasty 15, c. 1648–1540 BC. 📷 The Met www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

#Archaeology

Archaeologists discovered medieval pottery and rare, well-preserved wooden posts, with woven fencing, in Glasgow city centre.

Photo credit Guard Archaeology
www.bbc.com/news/article...

Some of the surviving frescoes from the House of Livia, the wife of Augustus, on the Palatine Hill in Rome. The frescoes date to around 30 BC. 📷 My own. #FrescoFriday #Rome

Fresco in creams, yellows, and blues showcasing flowers - likely papyrus - potential bird life and monkeys. Most of the fresco is small fragments with large sections of hypothetical restoration.

It’s time to celebrate #FrescoFriday with a little bit of monkeying around 🐵

We travel back in time to Knossos. Dating to c. 1580–30 BCE this fresco panel is largely fragmentary. Flowers and nature seem to be abundant but the exact composition of the scene remains elusive.

#AncientHistory

Can't let #FindsFriday go past without another fine Iron Age coin. This is a base silver stater attributed (probably wrongly) to the Veneti, in southern Brittany. Diameter 22mm. Note the recumbent figure below the horse - what is he holding? #archaeology #numismatics 🏺

For #FindsFriday:
Silver objects from the House of Menander, #Pompeii. The house must have belonged to a member of the town’s ruling classes.
118 pieces of silverware found in a chest in a hiding place built following the earthquake of 62 AD.
📸 my own, Naples Archaeological Museum.
#Archaeology

A close up view of a reconstructed Saxon helmet

#FindsFriday After returning from the East I'm probably overdue a visit back to the incredible Sutton Hoo..

📷 Reconstruction of the powerful & iconic helmet of Rædwald of East Anglia - which really does blow your socks off 🤯

My own, winter 2022

#FindsFriday
Depictions of Gaulish mercenaries from Ptolemaic Egypt, 220-180 BCE,
📷 British Museum, London

#Archaeology #History #Artwork