This is a book that reflects the uncomfortable truce that has been reached between pragmatism and ideology within the archaeological community in regard to metal detecting. Papers on metal detector use in Poland and South Africa describe regimes wherein freelance metal detecting is banned; detectors may only be used under licence within a controlled research [...]

This is another quietly evangelising publication, priced to ensure a wide circulation and written by the leading experts in their field, part of whose purpose is to alert non metallurgists (NMs) to the sorts of thing that get metallurgists (Ms) excited so that NMs across the archaeological community can help Ms identify sites and material [...]

It is astonishing to think that this two-volume report, the definitive account of Roger Mercer’s excavations at Hambledon Hill between 1974 and 1986, has only just been published when the results of those excavations have in fact influenced the thinking of every archaeologist who has ever worked on a Neolithic causewayed enclosure over the last [...]

Nothing is as good as a question to establish the theme of a book. But in this case the question is not just answered by trawling through historical records to establish which wealthy patrons sought to bribe St Peter by sponsoring the construction of one of England’s finest churches: our authors are just as concerned [...]

This is an excellent book about a subject so fundamental to archaeological field practice that nobody should be let loose on an excavation unless they have read it. Human remains are everywhere, and this book tells us what we need to know about the laws relating to finds of human remains, and how to excavate, [...]

Many archaeologists regard Druids with disdain, as cranks or romantics who claim to have roots deep in the ancient past, but whose practices are largely invented in relatively recent times. This may be so, but archaeologists and Druids share a huge amount of DNA: certainly in the early years of the 18th century, it was [...]

Tuscany is famous for handsome villas set in elevated positions overlooking formal gardens of clipped box that give way to an increasingly wild landscape of water and woodland and terminating in a borrowed view of distant hills or peaks. The pattern is formulaic and deliberate, and is linked to complex ideas about the relationship between [...]

Coming to a library near you soon (one hopes, given the investment involved in owning a copy) is the third volume in David Neal and Stephen Cosh’s project to create the first complete corpus of Roman mosaics of Britain.

Bryony Coles gave the name ‘Doggerland’ to the drowned landscape beneath the North Sea in her 1998 paper in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society summing up all that was then known about the archaeology of an area better known for oil rigs and fishing. It is thanks in part to oil exploration and aggregates [...]

This Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology Monograph derives from a conference held in 2008 at Leicester University with the aim of stopping what the editors describe as the disturbing and potentially harmful fragmentation of post-Medieval archaeology into factions.

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.