Review by Lucia Marchini As well as death and displacement, conflict brings with it a threat to cultural heritage. Nearly one year on from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this timely and attractive volume (with profits donated to the organisation PEN Ukraine) brings together highlights of Ukraine’s culture from prehistory…
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:…
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…
This volume largely stems from the 2018 European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) annual meeting in Barcelona. The editors have obviously taken great care in compiling a cohesive and comprehensive collection of papers that work towards providing a new academic narrative in the area – an achievement that is to be…
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…
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…
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 late medieval sheep of Britain have so engaged the attention of the agrarian historians that other aspects of stock husbandry appear to have been neglected. Our knowledge of the cattle of the period, and of how they were kept, is somewhat sketchy…’ (Robert Trow-Smith, A History of British Livestock…
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 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…
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,…
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…
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.…
The sleepy village of Repton in south Derbyshire seems like an unlikely starting point for a voyage halfway around the world. But it is here that Cat Jarman begins her brilliant new history of the Vikings. In 873, Repton was the site of a massacre by the Great Viking Army.…
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…
I headed for the battlefield monument to get my bearings – an obelisk erected in 1740 to mark the spot where Warwick the Kingmaker, the greatest figure of the Wars of the Roses, was supposedly cut down...…
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…
• 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…
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…
When Stanley Christopherson wrote in his diary in late November 1945, he proclaimed, ‘So many outstanding things were done during this war, which so thoroughly deserved an award, but were never witnessed.’ The truism is appropriate. Recalling the battle conducted by his tank-crews of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, Christopherson had…
Kent is a county with a rich and unique archaeological record. Situated as it is, surrounded by sea to the north and east, cut off from London and Essex by rivers to the north-west, and divided from Surrey and Sussex by the hilly terrain of the Downland and High Weald…