Thames Mudlarking: Searching for London’s Lost Treasures

In the 19th century, mudlarks were people (mainly children) who would scour the muddy banks of the Thames for items like coal and metal that they could sell on. Nowadays, mudlarks set out at low tide (with mandatory licences from the Port of London Authority) in search of something different:…

Bar Locks and Early Church Security in the British Isles

Have you ever wondered why there is often a big hole in the wall just inside a medieval church doorway? This book is primarily a study of the bar locks they were made to hold. Some were huge – like the still-functioning ones that go more than 3m deep into…

Hoards from Wiltshire

The landscape of Wiltshire is full of indications of the county’s rich history, but perhaps some of the most compelling information about the area’s past comes from the hoards buried beneath its soil. The contents of these hoards vary widely, as do the reasons for their deposition, but all offer…

Life, Death, and Rubbish Disposal in Roman Norton, North Yorkshire

This report describes the results of excavations conducted in 2015-2016 on the Brooklyn Hall site, south of the River Derwent, opposite the fort at Malton, and immediately west of the main road from York. All those involved are to be commended for ensuring the results and analysis have been published…

Visions of the Roman North: art and identity in northern Roman Britain

This remarkable and important study of the art and culture of northern Roman Britain has been published almost two decades after my own – The Heirs of King Verica (Tempus, 2002; 2nd edition: Amberley, 2010), which dealt almost entirely with southern Britain – first appeared. Both are highly personal visions,…

The Maltese Archipelago at the Dawn of History

This, the third volume to tackle the legacy data from Malta (Tanasi et al. 2011; 2015), effectively lays the groundwork from which to launch renewed archaeological investigations. Its reinterpretation of past excavations highlights the fragile nature of the archaeological remains on the island and the limitations of past fieldwork concerning…

Growing up in the Ice Age

Growing Up in the Ice Age represents both the first book-length work on the lives of children throughout the Plio-Pleistocene, and a superlative example of how the study of children can be fully integrated into more traditional areas of Palaeolithic research. After making a strong case for why we should…

Pre and Protohistoric Stone Architectures: comparisons of the social and technical contexts associated to their building

Generically, monuments are organised using four recognised architectural elements: the mound, the entrance or façade, the passage, and the chamber.  I suppose a fifth element could be landscape. These clear building traits are repeated across much of Atlantic Europe. However, there are many idiosyncratic nuances that establish regional traditions in monument-building,…

A History of World Egyptology

The Rosetta Stone that proved key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, discovered by a French military engineer in 1799 (now in the British Museum), and the gold mask of Tutankhamun, discovered by British Egyptologist Howard Carter in 1922 (now in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum), are generally considered the world’s most-famous…

Aftermath: life in the fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955

The defeated German soldiers who returned from the Second World War were so broken by the conflict that a specific term for them emerged. Heimkehrer were, according to Harald Jähner, battered survivors who returned to a society which they no longer recognised. Nowhere was this more evident than at home.…

Barbarossa Through German Eyes

Hitler’s invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 – Operation Barbarossa – initiated a campaign of epic proportions. While the format of recounting a campaign through the recollections of individual participants is well established, the author does an exceptionally good job of using a host of letters and diary entries…

The Devil’s Bridge: the German victory at Arnhem, 1944

Few events in military history have been picked over as much as Operation Market Garden, now notorious only because it resulted in a German victory when it was believed that, halfway through 1944, German victories were a thing of the past. With The Devil’s Bridge, Anthony Tucker-Jones has given us…

MHM’s round-up of the latest military history titles

• Paths of Fire: the gun and the world it made
• Pathfinders
• The Viking Great Army and the Making of England
• SBS: Silent Warriors
• The Confidence Men: how two prisoners of war engineered the most remarkable escape in history
• Blood and Ruins: the Great Imperial War, 1931-1945…

The Western Front: a history of the First World War

This is the first of a planned three-part history of the First World War organised by theatre. The second volume will deal with the Eastern Front (including Italy and the Balkans), the third with the wider war (mainly the Middle East and Africa). It is, first and foremost, a narrative…

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