2019-08-17
This book started interesting enough – but by the time it reached the Bronze Age my interest was flagging. The main problem is that this book doesn’t really seem to know its purpose, or audience.
It’s very focused on describing “stones and bones”, with only a limited narrative about them. So rather than any real focus on explaining how prehistoric peoples and their societies developed in Britain we’re instead provided with endless details about excavated sites.
Which in itself means that this could prove to be a useful reference book – except for the fact that it’s completely lacking in academic footnotes and references. The result is a book that could overwhelm the general reader with too much specific information, while not providing enough for the undergraduate.
Admittedly this is an old book – first published in the 1980’s – that has an old-fashioned approach to archaeology, in which detailing pottery and burials and postholes is considered the more important. While it has been updated to some degree for 2010, the result is patchy – apparently, climate change may or may not be a thing.
Another striking omission is Ireland, which is kept outside of the scope of this book, even though it’s geographically and culturally part of Britain in prehistory – and takes up a third of every single map in this volume. Perhaps it might have been more judicious for the author to focus on a fewer number of excavations in England in order to accommodate a more holistic view of developments across Britain and the near continent, in order to provide a more general overview.
Overall, I’m sure I’ll come back to this book to reference the periods I’ve most interested in, but ultimately I think Darvill’s book attempts to do too much with the result that its achievements are limited.
Also, a note to the publisher to check the use of hyphens in the ebook: they se-em to have enter-ed the text in a ran-dom fash-ion.
Rating: 3/5