Few people have recently had as much face time with the ghosts of the Roman emperors as Mary Beard, a well-known professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her latest book – Twelve Caesars: images of power from the ancient world to the modern – examines every skin fold,…
MHM Editor Neil Faulkner recalls one of the great works of military history.…
Adam Morgan Ibbotson has successfully brought together around 100 prehistoric sites from across Cumbria into a much-needed single volume. Home to a range of prehistoric monuments, Cumbria has more than just stone circles, with notable examples including the Mayburgh Henge and the Great Urswick burial chamber. The book begins by…
This book presents the results of excavations at the Dix Pit quarry near the village of Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, which revealed one of the largest and most-remarkable Pleistocene assemblages yet to be found in Britain, with finds spanning over c.200,0000 years. The site was first revealed after a mammoth tusk…
The arrival of the Viking Great Army on British soil in AD 865 had an immeasurable impact on England. No longer content with hit-and-run raids, this force – which was far greater than any previously seen in Britain – aimed for political conquest and settlement. In only a decade or…
And here’s another point to take note of, that not everything people laugh at is witty.…
In this latest book in the 50 Finds series, Arwen Wood, Finds Liaison Officer for Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes, presents Britain’s history through the objects found across the county and recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS). Sadly lacking in standing archaeological remains, Buckinghamshire is sometimes thought of as a…
Belonging and Belongings is the latest BAR publication in the Archaeology of Roman Britain series. Focusing on the portable archaeology of the ‘Iceni’, Natasha Harlow presents an enormous volume of work that challenges the traditional, Roman historians’ accounts of the area and the people who lived within it in the…
It is always interesting to find a new book about bricks. Often ignored, these little marvels need to be celebrated, and, for this reviewer at least, there can never be too many opportunities to do so. The ability to manufacture sufficient bricks to meet demand underpins the industrial history of…
The history of the Mesopotamian city of Babylon had a powerful legacy even within antiquity. Today, many are familiar with the city, situated in modern Iraq, for its numerous appearances in the Bible and for the fabled wonder of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. For the Roman…
Over the last decade, revolutions in the scientific analysis of archaeological material have allowed us to delve deeper into the origins and migrations of modern humans. Through the lens of Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, and journalist Thomas Trappe, this volume brings the nascent…
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,…
