Winner, Current Archaeology 2023 Book of the Year 2023 This volume brings together several years of work devoted to the wider landscape of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site. It documents the results of a program of geophysical and related survey across an area of c. 285 hectares between Skara Brae on the west Orkney coast and Maeshowe, by the Loch of Stenness. The project has made it possible to talk for the first time about the landscape context of some of the most remarkable and renowned prehistoric monuments in Western Europe. The aims are to synthesize the data from different forms of survey and to document the changing character and development of this landscape over time. The results are genuinely remarkable are presented in a manner which makes the material of interest and value to a relatively wide readership, with an array of images which fully document and interpret the evidence. Survey work at a landscape scale tends to deal with palimpsests. Here descriptive sections are set within a thematic structure designed to explore the changing use and significance of different areas over time. The results shed important new light on the character and extent of known prehistoric sites and ceremonial monuments. But they also document the afterlives of these and other places and their relation to the lived landscapes of the historic and more recent past. In tracing the changing configuration of the World Heritage Area, we can begin appreciate this landscape as an artifact of several millennia of dwelling, working land, attending to wider worlds and to the past itself.

This book offers a groundbreaking analysis of Neolithic art and architecture in Orkney, focussing upon the incredible collection of hundreds of decorated stones being revealed by the current excavations at the Ness of Brodgar.

In this unique guide to Britain's megalithic culture, rock n' roller Julian Cope provides an inspired fusion of travel, history, poetry, maps, field notes, and pure passion.

Dolmens are iconic international monumental constructions which represent the first megalithic architecture (after menhirs) in north-west Europe. These monuments are characterised by an enormous capstone balanced on top of smaller uprights. However, previous investigations of these extraordinary monuments have focussed on three main areas of debate. First, typology has been a dominant feature of discussion, particularly the position of dolmens in the ordering of chambered tombs. Second, attention has been placed not on how they were built but how they were used. Finally much debate has centred on their visual appearance (whether they were covered by mounds or cairns). This book provides a reappraisal of the ‘dolmen’ as an architectural entity and provides an alternative perspective on function. This is achieved through a re-theorising of the nature of megalithic architecture grounded in the results of a new research/fieldwork project covering Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia. It is argued that instead of understanding dolmen simply as chambered tombs these were multi-faceted monuments whose construction was as much to do with enchantment and captivation as it was with containing the dead. Consequently, the presence of human remains within dolmens is also critically evaluated and a new interpretation offered.

The Orcadian archipelago is a museum of archaeological wonders. The Orcadian Neolithic is home to some of the best-preserved Neolithic sites in Europe: here we can find evidence of a dynamic society with connections binding Orkney to Ireland, to southern Britain and to continental Europe. Yet there is much that remains unknown about the societies that created these sites. In Orcadia, Mark Edmonds traces the development of the Orcadian Neolithic from the early fourth millennium BC through to the end of the period nearly two thousand years later, using artefacts, architecture and the wider landscape to recreate the lives of Neolithic communities across the region.

In Secret Britain, join anthropologist and broadcaster Mary-Ann Ochota for a tour of more than 70 of Britain's most intriguing archaeological sites and artefacts.

“Alice Albinia is the most extraordinary traveler of her generation. . . . A journey of astonishing confidence and courage.”—Rory Stewart One of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains and flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. It has been worshipped as a god, used as a tool of imperial expansion, and today is the cement of Pakistan’s fractious union. Alice Albinia follows the river upstream, through two thousand miles of geography and back to a time five thousand years ago when a string of sophisticated cities grew on its banks. “This turbulent history, entwined with a superlative travel narrative” (The Guardian) leads us from the ruins of elaborate metropolises, to the bitter divisions of today. Like Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between, Empires of the Indus is an engrossing personal journey and a deeply moving portrait of a river and its people.