Review by Bryony Coles The blurb on the back of this book gives an uncommonly accurate description of its contents: ‘a popular science book that tells the story of one of the most important, but least known major archaeological sites in Europe’. Before turning to this story, though, I should…
The English armourers of the 15th century were great craftsmen, artists, and innovators. That is the essential conclusion of Tobias Capwell’s monumental study of the armour of the English knight in this period. It was once assumed that the domestic industry was modest and merely imitative in comparison with those…
One of the most tragic consequences of the First World War was the idea and the reality of ‘the missing’. All earlier wars had victims of which no trace was ever found, but the world’s first global industrialised conflict created millions. So shocking were the overall numbers of war casualties…
Soldiers is a personal selection of stories about war by a leading military historian following a lifetime spent studying the subject. It is not a heavyweight tome, but a fun-to-read book – if one can use such a term in this context – in which we range across the whole…
The superficial justification for Operation Chariot – the daring British commando raid on the French port of St Nazaire in March 1942 – was that it would deny Tirpitz a crucial repair dock. The destruction of the fearsome German battleship obsessed Winston Churchill. And, if it could not be destroyed,…
Within the space of three years between 1798 and 1801, Napoleon’s aspirations for an eastern empire were smashed. Not in Europe, where he reigned militarily supreme, but far away in the Near East – by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile on 1 August 1798; in Palestine after being…
Review by CH. This engaging overview of archaeological evidence in the Nene Valley spans the Iron Age to the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. Although relatively slim at 72 pages, it is packed with information and richly illustrated, drawing on the author’s more than 40 years of experience excavating and researching…
I’d wager that every one of us has beachcombed at some point in our lives. Collecting intriguing, eye-catching, and occasionally useful objects from the foreshore of beaches, lakes, and rivers is an instinctual behaviour likely as old as our earliest ancestors. And many people don’t just collect the objects that…
Review by Andrew Tibbs. Over a decade of excavation has taken place at the Manor Pit quarry site in Baston, Lincolnshire, and this volume details the archaeological work undertaken at the site, and subsequent analysis. Initially occupied in the Neolithic period, it wasn’t until the Bronze Age that pastoral activity…
Review by HB. From traces of Palaeolithic life along the coast to deserted medieval villages and a Cold War airfield, A History of Norfolk in 100 Places is a whistle-stop tour of the county’s most intriguing buildings, archaeological sites, and historic landscapes. Each ‘place’ is assigned its own entry and…
Review by Susan Oosthuizen. This study of 14 south Oxfordshire parishes covers the lowland valleys of both the Thame and Thames, typified by nucleated settlements and open fields, and the uplands of the Chiltern Hills, characterised by dispersed farms and hamlets set among small fields, pastures, and woodland. The first…
Review by Peter Halkon. Chariot burials are icons of Iron Age Britain. Apart from those found near Edinburgh and in Pembroke, they are clustered in eastern Yorkshire, with an outlier at Ferry Fryston in West Yorkshire. The most spectacular were at Burnby Lane and The Mile, Pocklington. Remarkably, both burials…
At Home in Roman Egypt offers the first full-scale investigation of life as experienced by the ordinary people of Roman Egypt in the 1st to 4th centuries AD. It approaches the subject by looking at the life course, following people’s experiences throughout the various stages of their existence, from conception…
What was understood about the gods, goddesses, spirits, and demons in ancient Egypt depended to a great extent on what was being explained or taught and by whom, when, and where. What was formally written down was also governed by fear of accidentally unleashing negative magical forces. Moreover, the ancient…
In 1951, Quest for the Lost City was published in the United States. Reviewed in The New York Times as ‘a sort of overland Kon-Tiki’ – in reference to Thor Heyerdahl’s recent Pacific Ocean adventure – the book was an instant success and remains in print today. In 1955, it…
For me, the crux of this book comes on page 132. Peter Davenport explains that ‘the plan of the Classical temple [was altered] into something quite similar to the more usual plan of temples in the north-west of the empire, the so-called Romano-Celtic temple…’. It is not the first time…
This book examines aspects of the medicine practised in the Roman Empire from the reign of Augustus to that of Marcus Aurelius. ‘Roman medicine’ was an amalgam, which combined the theories and practices of Greek physicians operating within the so-called ‘Hippocratic tradition’ with those of various healers from all over…
Over the past 50 years or so, the later prehistoric open-air rock art of Scotland has received much useful attention with the sterling work of researchers Ronald Morris and Stan Beckensall. It is only recently, though, that interest through Historic Scotland’s ‘Scotland’s Rock Art Project’ (ScRAP) has fully recognised the…
This well-produced collaborative volume (with 12 subsidiary authors and two illustrators) presents – very timeously – the results of the 2018 excavation of c.4.5ha of development land on the outskirts of Ely. While intermittent use is attested from the late Neolithic, the periods dominantly represented extend from the middle Iron…
Showcasing 12 articles in four parts, Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy emerged from a 2017 interdisciplinary conference, and the editors aimed to represent the diversity of topics that arise when archaeology and philosophy meet. This target is emphatically achieved. Part I deals with ‘Theory and Inference’, and contains an interesting…
At a time when even the highest-value coin in regular circulation (£2) will sometimes hardly cover the cost of a cup of coffee, it is refreshing to be transported back to an era when coins were generally much higher in value. A big part of that value lay in the…