In Brief
MHM’s round-up of the latest military history releases.
Books
High Pasture Cave: ritual, memory, and identity in the Iron Age of Skye
Caves have always captured the imagination. This is no less true of High Pasture Cave on the Isle of Skye, whose publication represents the latest contribution to a growing corpus in British cave archaeology. Nestled under the slopes of the…
Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed
After exploring the Bronze Age Collapse of 1177 BC in his previous two books (reviewed in AE 85 and AE 143), Eric Cline travels back some 200 years to investigate the inter-relationships between the ‘great kings’ and vassal rulers of…
The History of Ancient Egypt Explored Through its Gods, Myths and Rituals
As Lucia Gahlin explains in the final chapter of this book, popular perceptions of ancient Egyptian culture are traditionally informed by the works of Graeco-Roman writers, and by modern interpretations of Egypt’s ancient history in literature and film. But in…
Rewriting the History of the Great Sphinx
Colin Reader is a geologist by profession, but became fascinated by ancient Egypt, particularly the earliest phases of the civilisation. He has studied the Great Sphinx of Giza for nearly 30 years, applying his professional expertise to all the available…
Who’s Who at Deir el-Medina: A Prosopography of the Necropolis Workmen during the Ramesside Period
A site as intensely studied as Deir el-Medina, with its wealth of written sources, has produced a huge literature – the navigation of which is immeasurably eased by the present volume. Originally published in the Dutch Egyptologische Uitgaven series in…
Excavating Ancient Egypt: Fifty Years of Archaeological Memories
This is an unusual book that focuses not on excavation results and discoveries (although these are covered), but on life excavating in Egypt. Jeffrey Spencer, who directed many seasons of fieldwork for the British Museum and the Egypt Exploration Society,…
Upon a White Horse: journeys in ancient Britain and Ireland
Peter Ross has made quite a name for himself in recent years. His previous books, A Tomb with a View: the stories and glories of graveyards (2021) and Steeple Chasing: around Britain by church (2023), both became bestsellers, and I…
Pets & their People
Why do so many of us choose to share our lives – and our homes – with at least one animal? Pets & their People (published to accompany an exhibition of the same name – see here – and written…
The Chalcolithic and Bronze Age in Jersey
This book is part of Jersey’s Archaeological Research Framework, which also oversaw the publication of The Neolithic in Jersey by Alison Sheridan, Emmanuel Ghesquière, and Cyril Marcigny (reviewed in CA 431). The Framework was commissioned by Jersey Heritage and led…
Fractured Britannia: the twilight of Roman Britain
The end of Roman rule in Britain is not a niche topic: it is one that has been intensely studied for decades. And yet we still have so much to learn about how it unfolded and how much of a…
Making Art in the Ice Age: the story of how our ancestors made images
Ice Age art engages something within us that feels deeply and inherently human. Most of us feel it immediately: awe, curiosity, and perhaps even sometimes a feeling that borders on spiritual. Yet, while this response is nearly universal, the opportunity…
Anglo-Saxon Beads, 400-700 AD: a visual guide to types and techniques
Anglo-Saxon beads are important as, along with cruciform brooches, they are among the most studied and datable of all the objects found in Anglo-Saxon graves, made useful by their long date-range and by them being the most numerous objects found…
The Diver of Paestum: Youth, Eros, and the Sea in Ancient Greece
On 3 June 1968, Italian archaeologists digging the ancient city of Paestum made an extraordinary discovery. They had unearthed a tomb fashioned from slabs of travertine, containing the bones of an individual who had been lain to rest c.480 BC,…
Colonial Intrigues and My Dismissal as Director of Antiquities: A Memoir of Cyprus in the 1930s
‘Journeys, like artists, are born and not made ’, Lawrence Durrell begins his encomium to Cyprus, Bitter Lemons. For millennia, this Mediterranean island was a staging post to the Middle East; then, in British imperial times, it was close to…
Making Art in the Ice Age: The Story of How Our Ancestors Made Images
In 2024, Paul Bahn and Elle Clifford published Living in the Ice Age, adapting their 2022 publication Everyday Life in the Ice Age for a younger audience. In my review of their 2024 publication (CWA 126), I discussed how, following…
The Great Museum of the Sea: A Human History of Shipwrecks
Most maritime archaeologists spend their careers trying to tease out what happened before a ship sank by asking questions like who was on board, when was it built, where was it going, and why? While poring over James Delgado’s new…
In Brief
MHM’s round-up of the latest military history releases.
Wolfpack: inside Hitler’s U-boat war
As Roger Moorhouse suggests in the introduction to Wolfpack, it was natural that post-war English language books about the Battle of the Atlantic would largely ignore the German perspective on the conflict. After the horrors of war, a kind of…
The Spanish Civil War in the Air Volume 1: 1936-37
Under-funded and wracked by the hostility between political factions within its ranks, Spain’s military aviation was in a dire state in the period immediately before the Spanish Civil War. At this time, the air force was equipped with 60 Bréguet…
Germany’s First World War Aviators: the lives of fliers
Since the late 1990s, the study of World War I has moved beyond the constraints of military history to embrace an increasingly multidisciplinary agenda. Not least in this has been the adoption and incorporation of anthropological and archaeological perspectives, focusing…
Tunisgrad: victory in Africa
It is something of a cliché in the history of the Second World War to claim that Stalingrad, the graveyard of Germany’s Sixth Army in Russia, was the decisive turning point of the conflict: the moment when Hitler’s hopes of…
Domination: the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity
Through her TV work and writing, Professor Alice Roberts is a powerful and effective advocate for archaeology in the public realm. In Domination, she extends her coverage to explore Christianity in Late Antiquity, unpicking the intimate connection between the spread of…
Common Ground in Scottish Archaeology: contributions in honour of Anna Ritchie
Few people have made such a profound impact on the understanding of Scotland’s prehistoric and early medieval past as Anna Ritchie. In 2022, the Scottish Society for Northern Studies and the Pictish Arts Society jointly hosted a conference to celebrate…
Archaeology of Britain’s Oldest Church Doors
For lovers of church archaeology, anything by Warwick Rodwell is a must. His new book covers two subjects: medieval ecclesiastical doors – the Westminster example is pre-Conquest and the Hadstock one a few years later – and the allegedly human…
Neolithic Timber Halls and a Bronze Age Settlement with Hoard at Carnoustie, Angus
The timber halls ex-cavated at Carnoustie between 2016 and 2017 are some of the most significant Neolithic discoveries in Scotland in recent decades, particularly considering that the bigger of the two halls is the largest of its period yet discovered…
The Archaeology of the Stonehenge Visitor Centre
This book draws together diverse excavations; geophysical, augering, and fieldwalking surveys; and other investigations carried out between 1991 and 2009 to help determine a location and explore design options for the Stonehenge Visitor Centre that opened in 2013 (see CA…
Neolithic Impressed and Related Wares in Britain and Ireland
This volume comprises 11 regional or national papers and a synthesis of lipid analysis results. Several contributors note that Impressed Wares have been a ‘Cinderella’ among Neolithic pottery traditions. They echo Isobel Smith’s 1974 characterisation of Peterborough Ware (the Impressed…
The Libyan Pharaohs of Egypt: Their Lives and Afterlives
Aidan Dodson’s The Libyan Pharaohs of Egypt is a detailed reappraisal of one of the most complex periods of ancient Egyptian history. Drawing on his long-standing expertise in Egyptian royal history, Dodson presents a richly illustrated, clear and balanced synthesis…
Clever Minds and Expert Hands: Egyptian Art and Artists in the New Kingdom
This new publication brings a welcome focus to the creative individuals behind the artistic achievements of the New Kingdom. Building on a 2022 conference in Madrid, the collection’s 12 papers examine a broad range of interconnected themes: the role and…
Ancient Nubian art: a history
The Nubian empire at its height was one of the largest in the ancient world – a land rich in gold and other resources, with thriving trade. Highly skilled artisans created distinctive and finely crafted jewellery, ceramics, and architecture. And…
Two months on the Nile: Thomas Sandwith’s Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Journey
Thomas Sandwith was a British diplomat who served as consul in the Levant from 1855 to 1891. This is the second volume in a biography written by historian and former senior British civil servant Stephen Boys Smith, which covers Sandwith’s…
Made In Ancient Egypt
This is the companion to an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, which includes objects gathered from many international collections, curated by Helen Strudwick. But it is more than a catalogue of the artefacts in the exhibition. Although not…
How England Began: From the Romans to the Anglo-Saxons
REVIEW BY CH Nicholas Higham’s comprehensive exploration of how ‘Roman Britain’ transitioned into ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ brings with it a wealth of topics that still resonate today – discussions of migration, integration, and cultural influences; Britain’s relationship with continental Europe; and…
Aspects of the Bronze Age in the Atlantic Archipelago and Beyond
REVIEW BY KK Published from the papers presented at the Belfast Bronze Age Forum, which took place on 9-10 November 2013, the editor makes a point of noting that the proceedings from this forum are not normally published, but that…
Hadrian’s Wall and Its Trees
REVIEW BY FEDERICO SANTANGELO Shortly after the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree, David Breeze gathered an outstanding lineup of contributors to reflect on specific sections of Hadrian’s Wall: the result was a brilliant little book that should be required…