Egyptian archaeologists yesterday displayed newly discovered tombs more than 4,000 years old and said they belonged to people who worked on the Great Pyramids of Giza, citing it as more evidence that slaves did not build the ancient monuments.

Days before Christmas, archaeologists have unveiled what they say are the remains of the first dwelling in Nazareth that can be dated back to the time of Christ – a find that could shed new light on what the hamlet was like when, according to the New Testament, Jesus lived there as a boy.

On this lovely, seasonal album, the voice behind The English Patient gives us a rare piece of musical archaeology.

"The names conjure up images of savagery and destruction," but Wells believes the Visigoths, Huns, Vandals had a bum rap. The Dark Ages were not so dark after all.

The recent discovery of the biggest hoard of gold ever found in Britain has brought tears to the eyes of experts and amateurs alike. Last month, Terry Herbert stumbled upon the huge trove of Anglo-Saxon treasure - worth at least £1 million - while metal detecting in a Shropshire field, while earlier this week, David Booth unearhed a £1 million Iron Age hoard.

It sounds like the plot of an Indiana Jones movie: an archaeology professor with little more to go on than a yellowing photograph discovers part of a 900-year-old statue deep in the Cambodian jungle, rewriting history in the process.

The history books on one of Britain’s most important battles will have to be re-written. The bad news for scholars is that the Battle of Bosworth Field, which marked the end of medieval England, didn’t take place where historians thought it did. But the good news is that the mistake has saved the battlefield from being looted and destroyed by metal detectorists.

They are known as the Dark Ages. But the golden sheen and exquisite workmanship of the Staffordshire hoard make that name seem singularly inappropriate. This vast collection of Anglo-Saxon treasures – and the manner of its discovery – will do wonders for the unfashionable pursuit of metal detecting. But the find will send an even bigger jolt of excitement through the archaeology profession. Artefacts tell us almost everything we know about the period when Germanic tribes – the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes – settled these islands because written sources from that era are so rare. So for Anglo-Saxon scholars this find is like the discovery of not only Tutankhamun's tomb, but the Rosetta Stone to boot. They will help unlock a culture.

The man who discovered an Anglo-Saxon hoard with his metal detector said he dug up so much gold he was seeing the precious metal in his sleep afterwards.

I did not discover The Making of the English Landscape until the early 1960s, though WG Hoskins had published his seminal book in 1955. I can remember avidly reading, and then the thrill of seeing what I was reading made manifest all around me where we then lived, in Oxfordshire: the ridge and furrow of medieval open fields, the lumps and bumps of deserted medieval villages, the grassy swathe of an old drove road.

Ian Shepherd, doyen of Scottish Local Authority archaeologists, has died at the early age of 58. The first such post-holder in the country, appointed to the newly formed Grampian Region in 1975, he was eventually Principal Archaeologist, Aberdeenshire Council, overseeing cultural heritage matters also for Angus and Moray.