When we think about Victorian childhood, we probably conjure up images of ragged Dickensian street urchins, strict educations, and children seen and not heard. As we might expect, though – and as demonstrated in this book – the reality was far more varied and interesting.

It is little surprise that geology initially evolved as a British science, for within a set of smallish islands the British Isles have been blessed by an almost unseemly range of rocks of all ages. Beneath our green and pleasant land sits a varied mineral wealth that has been exploited for four millennia (metals) and tens of millennia before that (lithics).

This is a teaching resource published by Forestry and Land Scotland. Aimed at students of later primary school age (that is, 8- to 12-year-olds), it teaches them about the Neolithic way of life. It follows on from Forestry Commission Scotland’s previous teaching resource on the Mesolithic: Wolf Brother’s Wildwoods.

Alasdair Whittle’s most recent contribution to this fascinating period in European prehistory argues cogently against the concept of wholesale change at a particular point in time. As for all prehistoric archaeology spatial and temporal development, adaption, and adoption create a complex narrative. This complexity has been made convincingly clear from recent innovations in chronometric dating techniques, which in turn have assisted Bayesian modelling research.

This small but fascinating book tells the story of quarrying, or ‘stone-getting’, in Cumbria, from prehistoric to modern times. David Johnson uses photographs accompanied by extended captions to reveal how slate, granite, limestone, clay, and gypsum were extracted from rock faces or dug out of the ground.

This book provides an eminently readable overview of freshwater fishing, redressing the focus on sea fishing that has dominated archaeological narratives in recent years. The author is a leading fish-bone specialist, so there is mention of archaeological data, including isotopic analyses of human bones as proxies for diet.

This new book, Finds Identified, is a chunky volume celebrating the rich material culture of England and Wales. Brimming with information on archaeological objects dating from the prehistoric to the modern period, it is richly illustrated with images from the online database of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS).

This book is a prime example of how combining historical, genealogical, and archaeological research can bring to life the individuals represented in an archaeological assemblage. Each discipline on its own can only provide glimpses into our past, but brought together they can provide much more vivid representations.

This book is a considerable achievement, being the first time that all available human burials from the middle Neolithic to middle Bronze Age in Wales have been catalogued, analysed, and presented in one volume.

The Selhurst Park Project, an investigation some 10km north-east of Chichester, comprised metal-detecting and geophysical surveys, but principally an excavation at Middle Barn of what was identified in aerial photographs as a ‘banjo’ enclosure and a series of conjoined plots.