REVIEW BY GRAEME CAVERS This volume comprises an assessment of the evidence for Iron Age object deposition from two study areas, modern Wales and Scotland, with the objective of identifying patterns in the available data. Primarily a desk-based exercise based…
REVIEW BY EILEEN MURPHY Exploring the mortuary record for Ireland from 8000 BC to AD 400, Death in Irish Prehistory is an inspirational book. Professor Gabriel Cooney draws on his rich experience of Irish prehistory to provide a thought-provoking and…
REVIEW BY STEPHEN RIPPON ‘Landscape history’ is often written as a chronological story, of which there are innumerable examples at the scale of individual parishes and counties. This innovative study is refreshingly different, both in its more thematic approach and…
REVIEW BY TONY WILMOTT This volume describes the archaeology of some four centuries of the life of a rural farm/villa of modest wealth. It is also accompanied by a highly accessible GIS resource at The settlement developed from an…
REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH When we think about the history and archaeology of the north, we are immediately drawn to the Inuit or Sami peoples. We forget the vastness of the polar region, which covers at least 20% of the surface…
REVIEW BY SHANNON LEE DAWDY Dead Man’s Chest is a collection of essays and research reports by practising archaeologists and historians who have conducted work on shipwrecks, terrestrial sites, artefact collections, and archival sources. It is the third book in…
REVIEW BY MATTHEW POPE From the start, Slimak is clear that The Naked Neanderthal is a very personal book and offers his own individual views on the archaeology of Neanderthal people. And this is an important point to make. The…
MHM’s round-up of the latest military history titles.
REVIEW BY ANDREW MULHOLLAND This latest book from biographer Clare Mulley goes way beyond the astonishing life story of Elżbieta Zawacka. For it also provides an important overview of 20th-century Poland, as well as a reminder of the horrors of…
REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON The Battle of Normandy has been covered extensively in the 80 years since it took place. But less well remembered is the naval campaign that accompanied it, the subject of this new book by Nick Hewitt,…
REVIEW BY DUNCAN CAMERON The reign of King John is a period of immense significance in English history, comparable to the events of 1066 and the Norman Conquest a century and a half previously. John’s signing of the Magna Carta…
REVIEW BY AB What was life like for the inhabitants of Europe in the last Ice Age? How did they make their clothes? Did children play with toys? What was their relationship with dogs? These are just some of the…
REVIEW BY KK Wolf Road is Alice Roberts’ first foray into children’s literature. Drawing on archaeological and anthropological evidence, the book tries to provide as accurate a window as possible into the world of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, and into how they…
REVIEW BY MIKE SHAW Northamptonshire is a county rich in archaeological remains, many of them discovered along the Nene Valley in the south of the county. Hence the present volume is valuable in looking at a transect of land in…
REVIEW BY FINOLA O’CARROLL This book details the results of research into the monument known as Tlachtga, which combined LiDAR and geophysics to build a picture of an extensive multi-phase monument, confirmed by three seasons of excavations from 2014 to…
REVIEW BY HUGH WILLMOTT This volume was prompted by a decade of excavations by Peter Davey following Rushen Abbey’s purchase by the Isle of Man government in 1998. While these form the core of the work, the volume also synthesises…
REVIEW BY CH The N25 New Ross Bypass in Co. Wexford was designed to alleviate the notorious peak-time tailbacks that were known to extend for miles on either side of the historic town of New Ross. Its 14km route, stretching…
REVIEW BY MICHAEL TUNNICLIFFE During the Twenty-seventh Dynasty (c.525-404 BC), Egypt was part of the sprawling Persian Empire. Material survivals from this time are scarce, and the Persians themselves left few documents relating to Egypt. One important exception comes from…
REVIEW BY MICHAEL TUNNICLIFFE This work comprises 14 essays spanning the late Roman Period to the present day, focusing on the daily life of the Copts, who have always been a minority community. The aim is to understand daily concerns…
REVIEW BY SARAH GRIFFITHS This new Archaeopress volume, with its eye-popping cover, is in effect a manifesto for ‘Egypopcult’, an emerging multi-disciplinary project studying ancient Egypt as reflected in contemporary popular culture, going beyond the use of Egyptian motifs, narratives,…
REVIEW BY SARAH GRIFFITHS When José María Barrera visited the Temple of Dendera for the first time, he was left breathless by the spectacular celestial ceiling of the pronaos – so much so, he returned a few years later armed…
REVIEW BY ANNA GARNETT The site of Tell el-Amarna presents a unique opportunity to understand aspects of the daily lives of ancient Egyptian people more than 3,000 years ago. The high level of preservation of the ancient city and its…
REVIEW BY PATRICK DANIEL This book summarises 17 years of work by MOLA Northampton/Northamptonshire Archaeology at a 70ha development by the Roman road north of Doncaster. The earliest remains comprised a ring ditch with early Bronze Age cremation burials, an…
REVIEW BY DANIEL JACKSON Hampton Court Palace, nestled within a bend of the Thames 13 miles from the centre of London, has a fascinating history, during which it grew from a medieval agricultural estate to one of the greatest palaces…
REVIEW BY AB The archaeological exploration of Worcester began with antiquarian works several hundred years ago, but the bulk of the research has been carried out since the mid-20th century. These excavations have revealed a wealth of information about Worcester’s…
REVIEW BY ROB IXER Over the decades, O’Brien has recorded, in intense detail, the earliest prehistoric copper mining in south-west Ireland, namely Beaker People’s Chalcolithic to early Bronze Age exploitation at Ross Island (now known for its massive contribution to…
REVIEW BY CH Infrastructure projects often offer exciting archaeological opportunities to explore an area’s past on a large scale. The construction of a windfarm off the Yorkshire coast was one such case: the cables connecting it to the National Grid…
REVIEW BY KK This is the third book in Alice Roberts’ recent series, which began with Ancestors (highlighting seven famous burials from prehistoric Britain; see CA 380), followed by Buried, which covered the quickly evolving funerary traditions from late Iron…
REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH If I had been asked a few months ago what I knew about a vast rock-art assemblage in Tibet, I would have simply shrugged my shoulders and asked what, when, where, and why. But then, thinking…
REVIEW BY NICK EVANS Abdudzhalil Abdudzhalilov called himself the ‘last of the Mohicans’. Until his death in 2015, he was the last inhabitant of the village of Gamsutl in Dagestan, in the south of the Russian Federation. A spectacular image…
REVIEW BY JOHN BINTLIFF This is a rather frustrating volume, although we need to know more about ancient Thessaly, a land of fertile plains in north-central Greece. The book focuses on 22 ancient cities in western Thessaly, typical for the…
REVIEW BY MS Migrations are back. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, large-scale population movements were frequently the go-to explanation for the appearance in the archaeological record of new ways of doing things – be it novel building styles,…
REVIEW BY JONATHAN EATON The Eastern Front: a history of the First World War is the second instalment in Nick Lloyd’s trilogy exploring the experiences and history of the conflict through an intensive focus on individual combat theatres. Lloyd is…
REVIEW BY ANDREW MULHOLLAND The Arctic campaign, fought between 1941 and 1945, saw Allied convoys battling through icy seas to deliver supplies to northern Russia. It was the stuff of legend. Yet more than 90 per cent of the cargo…
REVIEW BY JEFFREY JAMES This new book by Don Hollway ambitiously sets out to describe the complex interplay between competing European royal houses during what academics call ‘The Second Viking Age’. Hollway does so by examining the motivations and ambitions…
REVIEW BY DAVID FLINTHAM History knows many more armies ruined by want and disorder than by the efforts of their enemies, and I have witnessed how all the enterprises which were embarked on in my day were lacking for that…