Mick AstonRezensionen

This book is informative and interesting, and based on his research specialisation, but I found Mick Aston much more compelling as a jovial TV archaeologist on Time Team.

I'm a big fan of archaeology and the British program "Time Team" is endlessly fascinating, to me. In the series, actual archaeologist and other specialists perform digs. Each episode covers a fast 3-day dig (usually somewhere in England) to discover something expected or known-but-lost. I learned a lot about the history of England, from the prehistoric to early 20th century.

This book is from that Team. Various experts (including Time Team's resident artist) give both learned opinion and specific examples from actual fieldwork. The basic setup is an invented town (Timechester), which allows a single location that can be given a history throughout the last 452,000 years. Give or take.

Everything is based on actual knowledge of numerous locations throughout the British Isles, transferred to Timechester.

Each chapter is a time period, from the Paleolithic (450,000 BCE), which is mostly a description of the location and some fauna and nomadic peoples who used it, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, High Medieval, Post-Medieval, Early Modern, to Present Day.

This is a good book for fans of archaeology, fans of extended British history, and fans of Time Team.

A great work that will continue to be of value, for many years to come!

8/10 (very good): Easy to read and surprisingly practical, Archaeology Is Rubbish treads exactly the right line between too much and too little detail. A great read for all serious fans of Time Team.

The definitive guide to the location, history, & significance of the world's most important archaeological sites & finds

Absolutely wonderful study of ten thousand years of landscape history and material culture of the Somerset village of Shapwick. Much of the work was carried out by the inhabitants of the village itself.

Expensive? Yes, definately! Informative? Perhaps, if you know nothing about landscape history already. A milestone in the study of Medieval settlement? Not really.
The debt owed to Maurice Beresford and John Hurst by landscape historians is acknowledged with this present collection of papers. Using an interdisciplinary approach, in keeping with Beresford and Hurst's view of the historical landscape, this book represents a tripartite analysis of the rural English medieval settlement. The editors have collected together a series of papers from researchers in a number of fields, many of whom are themselves members of the Medieval Settlement Research Group, a grandchild as it were of Beresford's original Deserted Medieval Village Research Group. It is, however, impossible to give a full consideration of all these papers in such a small space. The book is, on the whole, well presented, with clear maps and diagrams (though one or two seem over-large) and a number of good black-and-white photographs of long-lost landscapes.
When its book is finally closed, what impressions does this book give? There is unashamedly no underlying theme to the book as it covers a diverse spread of ideas and approaches within the fields of documentation, fieldwork and archaeology. Papers included range from settlement dispersion to peasant farm buildings and from 'Grassy Hummocks...' to 'Truffle hunters...'. Many papers are, howevewr, reviews of past or current research. There is even a wide disparity of terminology, of county boundaries and what we actually mean by 'the Medieval period'. It ought, however, to be congratulated for its 'whole landscape' view, of not seeing inidividual settlements as isolated, but as part of dynamic systems, in both time and space. The book also mirrors the break with tradition which has recently developed in historical geography, as the 'Midland system' of widespread open fields and nucleated villages has been replaced by the growing realisation by workers of the great variety in the landscape. Furthermore, as the book introduces much of the new methodology of landscape research, it could be a good starting point for many a new student project, with its many case studies. At its hefty cover price, however, I feel that this book, useful as it may be, is beyond the reach of many, and its place on the bookshelf may have been taken by a handful of books already.

Good introduction to creating your own archaeological dig, what to expect and how to record anything you do find.

32053400000189