Caspian Richards
Biographic Data
| ID | 120490 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Caspian Richards |
| GIVEN NAMES | Caspian |
| FAMILY NAME | Richards |
| SIGNATURE | RICHARDS C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3151-4915 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 320 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Lawrence Stenhouse
Local and exotic sources of sarsen debitage at Stonehenge revealed by geochemical provenancing
The application of novel geochemical provenancing techniques has changed our understanding of the construction of Stonehenge, by identifying West Woods on the Marlborough Downs as the likely source area for the majority of the extant sarsen megaliths at the monument. In this study, we apply the same techniques to saccharoid sarsen fragments from three excavations within and outwith the main Sarsen Circle to expand our understanding of the provena…
How Waun Mawn stone circle was designed and built, and when the Bluestones arrived at Stonehenge
In response to Timothy Darvill's article, ‘Mythical rings?’ (this issue), which argues for an alternative interpretation of Waun Mawn circle and its relationship with Stonehenge, Parker Pearson and colleagues report new evidence from the Welsh site and elaborate on aspects of their original argument. The discovery of a hearth at the centre of the circle, as well as further features around its circumference, reinforces the authors’ original interp…
Reconstructing extraction techniques at Stonehenge’s bluestone megalith quarries in the Preseli hills of west Wales
The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales
Megalith quarries for Stonehenge's bluestones
Islands of history
Local Histories of Passage Grave Building Communities
Reorientating the Dead of Crossiecrown
Containment, closure and red deer
Erosion of sand dunes in the Bay of Skaill, close to the Neolithic site at Skara Brae, exposed a spread of faunal remains and stone tools representing a Late Neolithic butchery site separated by a wall from a deposit of articulated red deer bone. This is an unusual and significant bone assemblage comprising both fragmented and articulated remains of red deer together with some domesticates. Also a whale mandible was closely associated with the bu…
Settlement Duration and Materiality
Radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modelling, undertaken as part of the investigation by the Times of Their Lives project into the development of Late Neolithic settlement and pottery in Orkney, has provided precise new dating for the Grooved Ware settlement of Barnhouse, excavated in 1985–91. Previous understandings of the site and its pottery are presented. A Bayesian model based on 70 measurements on 62 samples (of which 50 samples …
The dead of Stonehenge
Stonehenge's Avenue and 'Bluestonehenge
Google Under-the-Earth
This article focuses on the use of Google Earth as a tool to facilitate public engagement and dissemination of data. It examines a case study based around one of the largest archaeological investigations of the Stonehenge landscape, the Stonehenge Riverside Project. A bespoke layer for Google Earth was developed to communicate the discoveries of the research by creating an engaging, interactive and informative multimedia application that could be…
Craig Rhos-y-felin
Stonehenge
This article focuses on Stonehenge, the most famous stone circle in the world. It is located within one of the thickest concentrations of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age monuments in northern Europe. The discussion begins with a review of the latest excavation campaigns that were conducted on Stonehenge, and then discusses the various monuments and structures which were erected at various periods and stages from 8000 to 1520 BC. It also describes …
Durrington Walls to West Amesbury by way of Stonehenge
A new sequence of Holocene landscape change has been discovered through an investigation of sediment sequences, palaeosols, pollen and molluscan data discovered during the Stonehenge Riverside Project. The early post-glacial vegetational succession in the Avon valley at Durrington Walls was apparently slow and partial, with intermittent woodland modification and the opening-up of this landscape in the later Mesolithic and earlier Neolithic, thoug…
Road my body goes
Recognizable throughout the world, the stone statues (moai) of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) represent the largest monolithic architecture produced in Polynesia. The exquisitely carved and finished head and torso of each statue testifies to a skill in stone carving and dressing unmatched throughout the Pacific. Yet, approximately one thousand 'classic' statues were produced at the quarries within a few hundred years. What was the ritual status of the …
Exploring the location and function of a Late Neolithic house at Crossiecrown, Orkney by geophysical, geochemical and soil micromorphological methods
Magnetic prospection was instrumental in the discovery of a multiphase Neolithic settlement at Crossiecrown on Mainland Orkney. Subsequent excavation revealed a number of structures, including a large circular walled house of Late Neolithic date with a range of well‐defined architectural features in its interior. This paper presents the discovery, excavation and in particular the functional analysis of this house. Soil micromorphology established…
Moai, quarries and roads. Experiences and results of geophysical survey on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)
Rapa Nui or Easter Island is home to some of the most recognisable archaeological monuments in the world, the iconic monolithic moai statues. The island is situated in the Eastern Pacific, approximately 3 000 km west of the coast of Chile and 2 500 km from Tahiti. The isolated location of the island is due in part to its formation by a series of volcanic eruptions. The differing stone types formed as a result of this volcanic activity are a key e…
Who was buried at Stonehenge
Stonehenge continues to surprise us. In this new study of the twentieth-century excavations, together with the precise radiocarbon dating that is now possible, the authors propose that the site started life in the early third millennium cal BC as a cremation cemetery within a circle of upright bluestones. Britain's most famous monument may therefore have been founded as the burial place of a leading family, possibly from Wales
The date of the Greater Stonehenge Cursus
The Greater Cursus - 3km long and just north of Stonehenge - had been dated by a red deer antler found in its ditch in the 1940s to 2890-2460 BC. New excavations by the authors found another antler in a much tighter context, and dating a millennium earlier. It appears that the colossal cursus had already marked out the landscape before Stonehenge was erected. At that time or soon after, its lines were re-emphasised, perhaps with a row of posts in…
The substance of Polynesian voyaging
The prehistory of Polynesia has been seen as a story of cultural dispersal of people throughout the eastern Pacific Ocean. Central to that story is the voyaging capabilities of Polynesians. However, the description of the dispersal as ‘exploration’ and ‘colonization’ promotes coherence to a form of practice for which there seems little evidence of consistency in intention or purpose. In Robert Suggs' words, ‘the cause of the continuance of eastwa…
The Stonehenge Riverside Project
The Stonehenge Riverside Project is a collaborative enterprise directed by six academics from five UK universities, investigating the place of Stonehenge within its contemporary landscape. In this contribution, a series of novel approaches being employed on the project are outlined, before the results of investigations at the Greater Stonehenge Cursus, Woodhenge, the Cuckoo Stone and Durrington Walls are discussed
Conflicts between Biodiversity Conservation and Human Activities in the Central and Eastern European Countries
Conflicts between the conservation of biodiversity and other human activities have been and continue to be of increasing concern in the European Union, often having important political, economic, and environmental repercussions. These conflicts have been addressed in the European Union by using a wide array of top down and bottom up tools, with varying degrees of success. A new challenge is now facing Europe with the integration of 10 new countri…
Monuments as landscape
In Britain and Ireland there is a tendency for late Neolithic monuments to be clustered in groups and located at similar topographic positions. In this paper a group of spectacular monuments, including henges, passage graves and standing stones, in Orkney is examined. It is shown how the development of the monuments occurs and how they draw on the visual imagery of the natural world in their architectural representation. As each monument embodies…
Henges and Water
This paper examines the adoption by archaeologists of perspectives of 'land scape' currently being explored in the social sciences. Despite an appreci ation of the social construction of landscape and nature, it is suggested that generally archaeologists have failed to take account of the significance of the social identification of 'natural' constituents of the world. Virtually all societies identify particular 'elements' in the composition of t…
The age of Stonehenge
Stonehenge is the icon of British prehistory, and continues to inspire ingenious investigations and interpretations. A current campaign of research, being waged by probably the strongest archaeological team ever assembled, is focused not just on the monument, but on its landscape, its hinterland and the monuments within it. The campaign is still in progress, but the story so far is well worth reporting. Revisiting records of 100 years ago the aut…
Materializing Stonehenge
This article reviews recent interpretations of Stonehenge in terms of contrasting uses of stone and timber in the mid-3rd millennium BC. It explores the relationship of this enigmatic monument with circles of wood at nearby Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, establishing how these various monuments might have been integrated into a single scheme in which these remarkable structures were linked by artificial avenues and the natural feature of the Riv…
Who was buried at Stonehenge
Stonehenge continues to surprise us. In this new study of the twentieth-century excavations, together with the precise radiocarbon dating that is now possible, the authors propose that the site started life in the early third millennium cal BC as a cremation cemetery within a circle of upright bluestones. Britain's most famous monument may therefore have been founded as the burial place of a leading family, possibly from Wales
Fragments from Antiquity
Excavations in the ceremonial complex of the fourth to 2nd millennium BC at Balfarg/Balbirnie, Glenrothes, Fife
The portions of the Balfarg/Balbirnie ceremonial complex excavated between 1983 and 1985 are described and related to the portions dug previously: Balbirnie stone circle (76/3594) and Balfarg henge (83/10516).The prehistoric ceremonial use of the area seems to have lasted from early in the third millennium until late in the second millennium BC (in terms of uncalibrated radiocarbon dates). The sequence began with pit-digging and pottery depositio…
Islands of history
The dead of Stonehenge
Decorating the Houses of the Dead
Megalithic art has often been treated as a unitary phenomenon, related to the spread of farming across Western Europe. This approach does not do justice to the very different ways in which tomb decoration was employed by particular communities. This article focuses on the megalithic art of Orkney, much of it recorded for the first time during a recent field survey. This is normally interpreted as a local variant of the style of ‘art’ found in Neo…
Settlement Duration and Materiality
Radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modelling, undertaken as part of the investigation by the Times of Their Lives project into the development of Late Neolithic settlement and pottery in Orkney, has provided precise new dating for the Grooved Ware settlement of Barnhouse, excavated in 1985–91. Previous understandings of the site and its pottery are presented. A Bayesian model based on 70 measurements on 62 samples (of which 50 samples …
Craig Rhos-y-felin
Conflicts between Biodiversity Conservation and Human Activities in the Central and Eastern European Countries
Conflicts between the conservation of biodiversity and other human activities have been and continue to be of increasing concern in the European Union, often having important political, economic, and environmental repercussions. These conflicts have been addressed in the European Union by using a wide array of top down and bottom up tools, with varying degrees of success. A new challenge is now facing Europe with the integration of 10 new countri…
The date of the Greater Stonehenge Cursus
The Greater Cursus - 3km long and just north of Stonehenge - had been dated by a red deer antler found in its ditch in the 1940s to 2890-2460 BC. New excavations by the authors found another antler in a much tighter context, and dating a millennium earlier. It appears that the colossal cursus had already marked out the landscape before Stonehenge was erected. At that time or soon after, its lines were re-emphasised, perhaps with a row of posts in…
Durrington Walls to West Amesbury by way of Stonehenge
A new sequence of Holocene landscape change has been discovered through an investigation of sediment sequences, palaeosols, pollen and molluscan data discovered during the Stonehenge Riverside Project. The early post-glacial vegetational succession in the Avon valley at Durrington Walls was apparently slow and partial, with intermittent woodland modification and the opening-up of this landscape in the later Mesolithic and earlier Neolithic, thoug…
Megalith quarries for Stonehenge's bluestones
Stonehenge's Avenue and 'Bluestonehenge
Road my body goes
Recognizable throughout the world, the stone statues (moai) of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) represent the largest monolithic architecture produced in Polynesia. The exquisitely carved and finished head and torso of each statue testifies to a skill in stone carving and dressing unmatched throughout the Pacific. Yet, approximately one thousand 'classic' statues were produced at the quarries within a few hundred years. What was the ritual status of the …
Reconstructing extraction techniques at Stonehenge’s bluestone megalith quarries in the Preseli hills of west Wales
Local and exotic sources of sarsen debitage at Stonehenge revealed by geochemical provenancing
The application of novel geochemical provenancing techniques has changed our understanding of the construction of Stonehenge, by identifying West Woods on the Marlborough Downs as the likely source area for the majority of the extant sarsen megaliths at the monument. In this study, we apply the same techniques to saccharoid sarsen fragments from three excavations within and outwith the main Sarsen Circle to expand our understanding of the provena…
How Waun Mawn stone circle was designed and built, and when the Bluestones arrived at Stonehenge
In response to Timothy Darvill's article, ‘Mythical rings?’ (this issue), which argues for an alternative interpretation of Waun Mawn circle and its relationship with Stonehenge, Parker Pearson and colleagues report new evidence from the Welsh site and elaborate on aspects of their original argument. The discovery of a hearth at the centre of the circle, as well as further features around its circumference, reinforces the authors’ original interp…
The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales
The Stonehenge Riverside Project
The Stonehenge Riverside Project is a collaborative enterprise directed by six academics from five UK universities, investigating the place of Stonehenge within its contemporary landscape. In this contribution, a series of novel approaches being employed on the project are outlined, before the results of investigations at the Greater Stonehenge Cursus, Woodhenge, the Cuckoo Stone and Durrington Walls are discussed
About face
(1991). About face: Aspects of art history and identity in South African visual culture. Third Text: Vol. 5, No. 16-17, pp. 101-134
The Double Agent
Power and the Curriculum
About face
(1991). About face: Aspects of art history and identity in South African visual culture. Third Text: Vol. 5, No. 16-17, pp. 101-134
Lecture Summaries
Ten lecture summaries:The Excavations of the Baroque palace and garden of the Earls of Mar at AlloaThe Neolithic settlement of Eilean Domhnuill, Loch Olabhat, North UistThe furnishing of the Palace of Holyroodhouse for the French Princes in 1796Disease in Scotland's past: the evidence from the bonesScottish Place-Names: signposts to the pastThe Sources of the Early Medieval Animal Ornament of the British IslesThe Norse, the Northern Isles and the…
Rethinking the Neolithic
Excavations in the ceremonial complex of the fourth to 2nd millennium BC at Balfarg/Balbirnie, Glenrothes, Fife
The portions of the Balfarg/Balbirnie ceremonial complex excavated between 1983 and 1985 are described and related to the portions dug previously: Balbirnie stone circle (76/3594) and Balfarg henge (83/10516).The prehistoric ceremonial use of the area seems to have lasted from early in the third millennium until late in the second millennium BC (in terms of uncalibrated radiocarbon dates). The sequence began with pit-digging and pottery depositio…
Architecture and Order
Fragments from Antiquity
Monuments as landscape
In Britain and Ireland there is a tendency for late Neolithic monuments to be clustered in groups and located at similar topographic positions. In this paper a group of spectacular monuments, including henges, passage graves and standing stones, in Orkney is examined. It is shown how the development of the monuments occurs and how they draw on the visual imagery of the natural world in their architectural representation. As each monument embodies…
Henges and Water
This paper examines the adoption by archaeologists of perspectives of 'land scape' currently being explored in the social sciences. Despite an appreci ation of the social construction of landscape and nature, it is suggested that generally archaeologists have failed to take account of the significance of the social identification of 'natural' constituents of the world. Virtually all societies identify particular 'elements' in the composition of t…
Out of America
School Inspection
Journal Article School Inspection: A Re-appraisal Get access Colin Richards Colin Richards Correspondence: Colin Richards, 1 Bobbin Mill, Spark Bridge, Cumbria LA12 8BS, UK. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 35, Issue 4, November 2001, Pages 655–665, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.00251 Published: 16 December 2002
Yet Another 'Crisis' in Primary Education? Anatomy of an Aborted Unpublished Enquiry 1948-1951
In the period since 1944 English primary education has been subject to recurring criticism. Official enquiries, surveys of attainment, individual causes-célèbres and the pronouncements of pundits have drawn attention to purported ‘rises’ The paper discusses the background, procedures and findings of the earliest of the post-war official enquiries – an unpublished and previously uncited investigation by the Central Advisory Council for Education (…
Decorating the Houses of the Dead
Megalithic art has often been treated as a unitary phenomenon, related to the spread of farming across Western Europe. This approach does not do justice to the very different ways in which tomb decoration was employed by particular communities. This article focuses on the megalithic art of Orkney, much of it recorded for the first time during a recent field survey. This is normally interpreted as a local variant of the style of ‘art’ found in Neo…
Information technology and rural development
This paper outlines how the widespread belief that we are experiencing an ‘information technology revolution’ has aroused concerns about unequal access to its perceived benefits. These concerns are explored both through general perspectives on the information revolution and in the specific context of approaches to rural development in Europe, in particular the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Various levels of government have launched initiativ…
Grouse shooting and its landscape
The Double Agent
Materializing Stonehenge
This article reviews recent interpretations of Stonehenge in terms of contrasting uses of stone and timber in the mid-3rd millennium BC. It explores the relationship of this enigmatic monument with circles of wood at nearby Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, establishing how these various monuments might have been integrated into a single scheme in which these remarkable structures were linked by artificial avenues and the natural feature of the Riv…
Conflicts between Biodiversity Conservation and Human Activities in the Central and Eastern European Countries
Conflicts between the conservation of biodiversity and other human activities have been and continue to be of increasing concern in the European Union, often having important political, economic, and environmental repercussions. These conflicts have been addressed in the European Union by using a wide array of top down and bottom up tools, with varying degrees of success. A new challenge is now facing Europe with the integration of 10 new countri…
The age of Stonehenge
Stonehenge is the icon of British prehistory, and continues to inspire ingenious investigations and interpretations. A current campaign of research, being waged by probably the strongest archaeological team ever assembled, is focused not just on the monument, but on its landscape, its hinterland and the monuments within it. The campaign is still in progress, but the story so far is well worth reporting. Revisiting records of 100 years ago the aut…
The substance of Polynesian voyaging
The prehistory of Polynesia has been seen as a story of cultural dispersal of people throughout the eastern Pacific Ocean. Central to that story is the voyaging capabilities of Polynesians. However, the description of the dispersal as ‘exploration’ and ‘colonization’ promotes coherence to a form of practice for which there seems little evidence of consistency in intention or purpose. In Robert Suggs' words, ‘the cause of the continuance of eastwa…
The Stonehenge Riverside Project
The Stonehenge Riverside Project is a collaborative enterprise directed by six academics from five UK universities, investigating the place of Stonehenge within its contemporary landscape. In this contribution, a series of novel approaches being employed on the project are outlined, before the results of investigations at the Greater Stonehenge Cursus, Woodhenge, the Cuckoo Stone and Durrington Walls are discussed
Moai, quarries and roads. Experiences and results of geophysical survey on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)
Rapa Nui or Easter Island is home to some of the most recognisable archaeological monuments in the world, the iconic monolithic moai statues. The island is situated in the Eastern Pacific, approximately 3 000 km west of the coast of Chile and 2 500 km from Tahiti. The isolated location of the island is due in part to its formation by a series of volcanic eruptions. The differing stone types formed as a result of this volcanic activity are a key e…
Who was buried at Stonehenge
Stonehenge continues to surprise us. In this new study of the twentieth-century excavations, together with the precise radiocarbon dating that is now possible, the authors propose that the site started life in the early third millennium cal BC as a cremation cemetery within a circle of upright bluestones. Britain's most famous monument may therefore have been founded as the burial place of a leading family, possibly from Wales
The date of the Greater Stonehenge Cursus
The Greater Cursus - 3km long and just north of Stonehenge - had been dated by a red deer antler found in its ditch in the 1940s to 2890-2460 BC. New excavations by the authors found another antler in a much tighter context, and dating a millennium earlier. It appears that the colossal cursus had already marked out the landscape before Stonehenge was erected. At that time or soon after, its lines were re-emphasised, perhaps with a row of posts in…
Exploring the location and function of a Late Neolithic house at Crossiecrown, Orkney by geophysical, geochemical and soil micromorphological methods
Magnetic prospection was instrumental in the discovery of a multiphase Neolithic settlement at Crossiecrown on Mainland Orkney. Subsequent excavation revealed a number of structures, including a large circular walled house of Late Neolithic date with a range of well‐defined architectural features in its interior. This paper presents the discovery, excavation and in particular the functional analysis of this house. Soil micromorphology established…
Archaeology (29 works) · Geography (27 works) · History (25 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (22 works) · Ancient history (14 works) · History (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Excavation (7 works) · Geology (7 works)