All of us go back to dark-skinned hunter-gatherers who have walked over a land bridge, and he asks us to remember that in a striking finale. An ideal Christmas present for that young person in your family considering a course in archaeology.

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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. As the author says, it's a past that's not a long parade of us in funny costumes—a fascinating 5-star read. Others are chance finds, leading to revelations out of proportion to the scale of the original projects.Journeying was instinctive, and inhumanities – aggression, war, despotism – arose when the virtue and dignity of travel were suppressed. 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.

What is slowly coming into focus, through analysis of these ten sites and many others, is a completely different picture. A great way to find out key information about the current state of knowledge across millennia of history and prehistory. His compelling, sometimes teasing, archaeological odyssey illustrates the diversity, complexity and sheer strangeness of the lives that represent Britain’s past.

All are extraordinary tales of luck and cutting-edge archaeological science that have produced profound, and often unexpected, insights into people's lives on these islands between a thousand and a million years ago. While this accessible book will reward readers of all ages and experience it should be on the reading lists of student archaeologists and historians everywhere. And after giving me episodes that I'd easily rate an 8 or a 9, they give me talk shows and reality shows, neither of which I watch because I consider them to be zeroes. In each chapter, the careful and methodical recording and preservation of structures and finds is highlighted, with any new technologies that arise in the telling well-explained, and the various experts who are brought in – whether that’s people who know about pollens or people who know about human bones – are celebrated and given their space and story. 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.