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

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Archaeology is a complex jigsaw puzzle, drawing together everything from skeletons to swords, temples to treasure.

Mike Pitts reviews ten significant archaeological sites in Britain, considering the latest (as of 2019) analyses of the artifacts and remains found. These discoveries illuminate Britain's ever-shifting history that we now know includes an increasingly diverse array of cultures and customs. 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. In countries where there are hunter-gatherers today (often people pushed into marginal places where anyone else would find it hard to live at all), they can be treated as second-class citizens.Britain has long been fascinated with its own history and identity, as an island nation besieged by invaders from beyond the seas: the Romans, Vikings and Normans. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. And so every year, hundreds of archaeologists across Britain go looking for more clues: who lived here, when and how? She contributed in her own small way to saving the Staffordshire Hoard for the nation and blogs at www. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Pitts is a great communicator and deals effectively with some complex excavations, technical information, and wider implications. With his background in both practical archaeology and journalism (not least being editor of British Archaeology magazine for 15 years), Pitts is supremely well-placed to give us this comprehensive but also compellingly fascinating and page-turning survey of British Viking to ancient history / prehistory. Mike Pitts leads us on a journey through time from the more recent and familiar to the most remote and bizarre, just as archaeologists delving into the earth find themselves moving backwards through the years until they reach the very oldest remnants of the past. The massive finding here is that people have been in Britain for much longer than we originally thought. 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.

The 2021 LSBUD Digging Up Britain Report is a must-read and powerful insight for all utilities and contractors engaged in any kind of excavation work for street and road works. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. And as so often in the history of archaeology, and as I will show in this talk, new ideas about Stonehenge and the landscape around are leading some of those changes. A great way to find out key information about the current state of knowledge across millennia of history and prehistory.

If an outpouring of new data threatens continually to undermine the way we think about the past, this is without doubt the most exciting time to be an archaeologist. Series 9 features historian Onyeka Nubia and archaeologists Cat Jarman and Stuart Prior in some episodes as presenters.I love these new archeology books in which history as it has been written is being reevaluated with new evidence and far less bias. An ideal Christmas present for that young person in your family considering a course in archaeology.