Robin Birley set out to excavate the entirety of the Vindolanda fort and associated civilian settlement on Hadrian’s Wall in 1970, calculating that the task would take him 20 years. Some 36 years on, he now thinks the task will take at least another 100 years of dedicated work.

While planning a book on the castles of Herefordshire, Terry Wardle came across references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to a castle built in 1051 by a Norman named Osbern.

The manor house, six labourer’s cottages and a church are all that now survive above ground of one of Hertfordshire’s smallest parishes, but plenty of earthworks survived to hint at a much larger Medieval settlement until 1973, when ploughing began to erode the site rapidly and a five year rescue excavation was set in train.

Parts of English Heritage could be likened to a private university in that some lucky members of staff (and their advisors and consultants) get to do the kind of primary research that even university academics struggle to find time for these days. Much of this research is used to inform the preservation and presentation of [...]

Paul Wilkinson’s beginner’s guide to practical archaeology comes with a solid endorsement from Mick Aston (‘I wish this book had been available when I started in archaeology’), and is selling very well, which reflects the demand that there is for a good primer, even in this era of constraint on volunteer archaeology.

Whoever coined the term ‘the Dark Ages’ must have been an archaeologist, because the literary record for the post-Roman period is far from sparse. Stuart Laycock (author of Britannia: the failed state, nominated for the Current Archaeology Book of the Year Award 2009) is one of a growing number of archaeologists who have begun to [...]

The editors state in their introduction that ‘we have encouraged the contributors [to this book] to develop their own points of view … to show the plurality of archaeology … [and to give] … some sense of the excitement, possibility and controversy of archaeological practices and results’. They have succeeded superbly, and though this Oxford [...]

This collection of essays reprinted from Merry Meet magazine (‘an independent quarterly journal of folklore and paganism’) begins with a disarming introduction in which the author, answering the charge that modern Paganism is a made-up religion, pleads guilty. But, he says, the modern Pagan revival is rooted in the findings of archaeologists and folklorists, and [...]

The author of this guide to the prehistoric and Roman sites in the boulder-clay lands of Essex and south Suffolk wants us to go out and look at the landscape and develop a feel for the archaeological dimension, to which too many people are blind. From a train window, do you see grass and trees, [...]

Pamela Jane Smith’s book is about the rise of prehistoric archaeology as an academic discipline and the inception of the world’s first formal honours degree course in archaeology, which occurred at Cambridge in 1915.