Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was a Kenyan-British paleoanthropologist and archaeologist whose work was important in demonstrating that humans evolved in Africa, particularly through discoveries made at Olduvai Gorge with his wife, fellow paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Having established a program of palaeoanthropological inquiry in eastern Africa, he also motivated many future generations to continue this scholarly work. Several members of the Leakey family became prominent scholars themselves.
Sutton Hoo is the site of two early medieval cemeteries dating from the 6th to 7th centuries near the English town of Woodbridge. Archaeologists have been excavating the area since 1938, when a previously undisturbed ship burial containing a wealth of Anglo-Saxon artefacts was discovered. The site is important in establishing the history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia as well as illuminating the Anglo-Saxons during a period which lacks historical documentation.
The year 1937 in archaeology involved some significant events.
The year 1926 saw a number of significant events in the field of archaeology:
Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA was a British paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised Proconsul skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, eastern Africa. For much of her career she worked with her husband, Louis Leakey, at Olduvai Gorge, where they uncovered fossils of ancient hominines and the earliest hominins, as well as the stone tools produced by the latter group. Mary Leakey developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She discovered the Laetoli footprints, and at the Laetoli site she discovered hominin fossils that were more than 3.75 million years old.
Bant's Carn is a Bronze Age entrance grave located on a steep slope on the island of St Mary's in the Isles of Scilly, England. The tomb is one of the best examples of a Scillonian entrance grave. Below Bant's Carn, lies the remains of the Iron Age village of Halangy Down.
Teppe Hasanlu or Tappeh Hassanlu is an archeological site of an ancient city located in northwest Iran, a short distance south of Lake Urmia. The nature of its destruction at the end of the 9th century BCE essentially froze one layer of the city in time, providing researchers with extremely well preserved buildings, artifacts, and skeletal remains from the victims and enemy combatants of the attack.
Hyrax Hill is a prehistoric site near Nakuru in the Rift Valley province of Kenya. It is a rocky spur roughly half a kilometer in length, with an elevation of 1,900 meters above sea level at its summit. The site was first discovered in 1926 by Louis Leakey during excavations at the nearby Nakuru Burial Site, and Mary Leakey conducted the first major excavations between 1937 and 1938. There are two distinct areas of occupation at Hyrax Hill: one which was occupied during the Pastoral Neolithic and late Iron Age, and one which was occupied by the Sirikwa earlier in the Iron Age.
Basil John Wait Brown was an English archaeologist and astronomer. Self-taught, he discovered and excavated a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo in 1939, which has come to be called "one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time". Although Brown was described as an amateur archaeologist, his career as a paid excavation employee for a provincial museum spanned more than thirty years.
Brahmagiri is an archaeological site located in the Chitradurga district of the state of Karnataka, India. Legend has it that this is the site where sage Gautama Maharishi and his wife Ahalya lived. He was one among seven noted Hindu saints. This site was first explored by Benjamin L. Rice in 1891, who discovered rock edicts of Emperor Ashoka here. These rock edicts indicated that the locality was termed as Isila and denoted the southernmost extent of the Mauryan empire. The Brahmagiri site is a granite outcrop elevated about 180 m. above the surrounding plains and measures around 500 m east-west and 100 m north-south. It is well known for the large number of megalithic monuments that have been found here. The earliest settlement found here has been dated to at least the 2nd millennium BC.
Mucking is an archaeological site near the village of Mucking in southern Essex. The site contains remains dating from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages—a period of some 3,000 years—and the Bronze Age and Anglo-Saxon features are particularly notable.
West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village is an archaeological site and an open-air museum located near to West Stow in Suffolk, eastern England. Evidence for intermittent human habitation at the site stretches from the Mesolithic through the Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Romano-British period, but it is best known for the small village that existed on the site between the mid-5th century and the early 7th century CE, during the early Anglo-Saxon period. During this time, around 70 sunken-featured buildings were constructed on the site, along with 8 halls and a number of other features. Subsequently abandoned, the area became farmland in the Late Medieval period.
The metal period incorporates a long stretched timeline of over three millennia, commencing from approximately 3500 BC up to middle of the 4th century BC. During this time, which includes the Copper, Bronze, and Iron Age periods we see the sophistication of life among the inhabitants of ancient Kosovo. This periods are well substantiated with archaeological findings, ranging from settlements to necropolises of different types, predominately tumuli. There are vast amounts of artifacts that have been collected and uncovered during the last century from these settlements and tombs, which prove the existence of civilization, and its continuation from prehistoric periods.
Ngenyn is a Late Stone Age and/or a Savanna Pastoral Neolithic archaeological site located in the Kapthurin River Basin, which is part of the Tugen Hills, west of Lake Baringo. It falls within the Baringo County in north central Kenya. The occupied area is situated on the floodplain of the River Ndau's confluence with the Sekutionnen River, on a widespread terrace called the Low Terrace, the top of which is about 3m above the level of the modern river. The site was initially discovered by Louis Leakey in 1969. It was visible as a large exposure of bones, stone tools and pottery eroding out of the terrace. The site was excavated in the late 1970s as part of Francoise Hivernel's PhD research. Ngenyn remains the only Late Holocene site excavated in the Lake Baringo Basin and in general very little archaeological work has been done on the Late Holocene within the Baringo County.
The Burzahom archaeological site is located in the Kashmir Valley of Jammu and Kashmir. Archaeological excavations have revealed four phases of cultural significance between 3000 BC and 1000 BC. Periods I and II represent the Neolithic era; Period III the Megalithic era ; and Period IV relates to the early Historical Period. The findings, recorded in stratified cultural deposits representing prehistoric human activity in Kashmir, are based on detailed investigations that cover all aspects of the physical evidence of the site, including the ancient flora and fauna.
Njoro River Cave is an archaeological site on the Mau Escarpment, Kenya, that was first excavated in 1938 by Mary Leakey and her husband Louis Leakey. Excavations revealed a mass cremation site created by Elmenteitan pastoralists during the Pastoral Neolithic roughly 3350-3050 BP. Excavations also uncovered pottery, beads, stone bowls, basket work, pestles and flakes. The Leakeys' excavation was one of the earliest to uncover ancient beads and tools in the area and a later investigation in 1950 was the first to use radiocarbon dating in East Africa.
The Elmenteitan culture was a prehistoric lithic industry and pottery tradition with a distinct pattern of land use, hunting and pastoralism that appeared and developed on the western plains of Kenya, East Africa during the Pastoral Neolithic c.3300-1200 BP. It was named by archaeologist Louis Leakey after Lake Elmenteita, a soda lake located in the Great Rift Valley, about 120 km (75 mi) northwest of Nairobi.
Sirikwa holes are saucer-shaped hollows found on hillsides in the western highlands of Kenya and in the elevated stretch of the central Rift Valley around Nakuru. These hollows, each having a diameter of 10–20 metres and an average depth of 2.4 metres, occur in groups, sometimes numbering fewer than ten and at times more than a hundred. Archaeologists believe that construction of these features may have begun in the Iron Age.
Dorothy Liddell, MBE (1890–1938), an pioneering woman archaeologist and mentor to both Mary Leakey and Mary Eily de Putron.
The Sirikwa culture was the predominant Kenyan hinterland culture of the Pastoral Iron Age, c.2000 BP. Seen to have developed out of the Elmenteitan culture of the East African Pastoral Neolithic c.3300-1200 BP, it was followed in much of its area by the Kalenjin, Maa, western and central Kenyan communities of the 18th and 19th centuries.
