Digging up Britain: Ten discoveries, a million years of history

Product Information

At each of these sites we hear from the people who found and recovered these ancient remains, and follow their efforts to understand them. Helen and Alex head to Sherwood Forest, home to Robin Hood, an outlaw who may or may not have been real.

His compelling, sometimes teasing, archaeological odyssey illustrates the diversity, complexity and sheer strangeness of the lives that represent Britain's past. There has never been a time before when so much ancient material was found, nor so much learnt about our distant history. These discoveries illuminate Britain's ever-shifting history that we now know includes an increasingly diverse array of cultures and customs. Dr Alice Roberts visits archaeological excavations around the UK, linking together the results of digs and investigations the length and breadth of the country to build up a picture of the y. A great sampling of the current usual suspects in archaeology as well as updates on old archaeological friends: Must Farm, Star Carr, Red Lady of Paviland, etc.I love these new archeology books in which history as it has been written is being reevaluated with new evidence and far less bias. Mike Pitts reviews ten significant archaeological sites in Britain, considering the latest (as of 2019) analyses of the artifacts and remains found.

The book works backwards through time, starting with a Viking site and ending in the mists of prehistory, parting to show us pre- homo sapiens peoples living their lives and doing their thing. Pitts pays tribute to the “meticulous and wise” Roger Jacobi here who put together scattered finds from a site that had been excavated and carved out for well over a hundred years. With 79 illustrations, 24 in colour An up-to-the-minute account of ten of the most exciting archaeological discoveries in Britain over the past decade.We’re soon in the Bronze Age, finding that every house has its set of bronze household implements, then there’s fascinating DNA evidence of population changes during the Neolithic, with Stonehenge being built by “immigrants” and being a place of spiritual importance for hundreds and hundreds of years. Along the way he explains how study of DNA in excavated remains demonstrates at least one almost complete replacement of one population by another - not when the Saxons or the Normans came, but sometime after the creation of Stonehenge.