It is one of the most famous prehistoric places in the world, but much about the origins of the Stonehenge landscape remains a mystery. Stunning new information about the Stonehenge landscape, especially in the third Millennium BC, has been uncovered by a number of university research teams in the twenty-first century.

It is one of the most famous prehistoric places in the world, but much about the origins of the Stonehenge landscape remains a mystery. Stunning new information about the Stonehenge landscape, especially in the third Millennium BC, has been uncovered by a number of university research teams in the twenty-first century.

In Breaking the Surface, Doug Bailey offers a radical alternative for understanding Neolithic houses, providing much-needed insight not just into prehistoric practice, but into another way of doing archaeology. Using his years of fieldwork experience excavating the early Neolithic pit-houses of southeastern Europe, Bailey exposes and elucidates a previously under-theorized aspect of prehistoric pit construction: the actions and consequences of digging defined as breaking the surface of the ground. Breaking the Surface works through the consequences of this redefinition in order to redirect scholarship on the excavation and interpretation of pit-houses in Neolithic Europe, offering detailed critiques of current interpretations of these earliest European architectural constructions. The work of the book is performed by juxtaposing richly detailed discussions of archaeological sites (Etton and The Wilsford Shaft in the UK, and Magura in Romania), with the work of three artists-who-cut (Ron Athey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio Fontana), with deep and detailed examinations of the philosophy of holes, the perceptual psychology of shapes, and the linguistic anthropology of cutting and breaking words, as well as with cultural diversity in framing spatial reference and through an examination of pre-modern ungrounded ways of living. Breaking the Surface is as much a creative act on its own-in its mixture of work from disparate periods and regions, its use of radical text interruption, and its juxtaposition of text and imagery-as it is an interpretive statement about prehistoric architecture. Unflinching and exhilarating, it is a major development in the growing subdiscipline of art/archaeology.

The general perception of the west midlands region in the Roman period is that it was a backwater compared to the militarized frontier zone of the north, or the south of Britain where Roman culture took root early – in cities like Colchester, London ,and St Albans – and lingered late at cities like Cirencester and Bath with their rich, late Roman villa culture. The west midlands region captures the transition between these two areas of the ‘military’ north and ‘civilized’ south. Where it differed, and why, are important questions in understanding the regional diversity of Roman Britain. They are addressed by this volume which details the archaeology of the Roman period for each of the modern counties of the region, written by local experts who are or have been responsible for the management and exploration of their respective counties. These are placed alongside more thematic takes on elements of Roman culture, including the Roman Army, pottery, coins and religion. Lastly, an overview is taken of the important transitional period of the fifth and sixth centuries. Each paper provides both a developed review of the existing state of knowledge and understanding of the key characteristics of the subject area and details a set of research objectives for the future, immediate and long-term, that will contribute to our evolving understanding of Roman Britain. This is the third volume in a series – The Making of the West Midlands – that explores the archaeology of the English west midlands region from the Lower Palaeolithic onwards.

Our knowledge about Stonehenge has changed dramatically as a result of the Stonehenge Riverside Project (2003-2009), led by Mike Parker Pearson, and included not only Stonehenge itself but also the nearby great henge enclosure of Durrington Walls. This book is about the people who built Stonehenge and its relationship to the surrounding landscape. The book explores the theory that the people of Durrington Walls built both Stonehenge and Durrington Walls, and that the choice of stone for constructing Stonehenge has a significance so far undiscovered, namely, that stone was used for monuments to the dead. Through years of thorough and extensive work at the site, Parker Pearson and his team unearthed evidence of the Neolithic inhabitants and builders which connected the settlement at Durrington Walls with the henge, and contextualised Stonehenge within the larger site complex, linked by the River Avon, as well as in terms of its relationship with the rest of the British Isles. Parker Pearson's book changes the way that we think about Stonehenge; correcting previously erroneous chronology and dating; filling in gaps in our knowledge about its people and how they lived; identifying a previously unknown type of Neolithic building; discovering Bluestonehenge, a circle of 25 blue stones from western Wales; and confirming what started as a hypothesis - that Stonehenge was a place of the dead - through more than 64 cremation burials unearthed there, which span the monument's use during the third millennium BC. In lively and engaging prose, Parker Pearson brings to life the imposing ancient monument that continues to hold a fascination for everyone.

This eagerly awaited volume documents the evidence for human activity in the Colne valley at Three Ways Wharf, Uxbridge in the Lateglacial and Early Mesolithic periods. A series of five in situ lithic and faunal scatters, centred on hearth settings on local high points within the valley floor, belong to two main phases of hunter-gatherer activity. The earlier phase, characterised by Lateglacial bruised-edge 'long blades' of the north German Ahrensburgian technocomplex, associated with reindeer and horse, is dated to c 10,000 BP. The succeeding Early Mesolithic phase is typified by broad, obliquely backed flint points, associated with a fauna dominated by red and roe deer, and dated some 800 radiocarbon years later at c 9200 BP. Detailed analyses of the important faunal and lithic assemblages, bolstered by an extensive refitting programme, have been fully integrated to provide new and striking behavioural explanations. These hunter-gatherer groups can now be seen as groups of people intent on pursuing their own independent and socially defined goals, and no longer solely in terms of their adaptive responses to environmental pressures. Three Ways Wharf will come to take its place alongside other iconic sites of the period such as Star Carr, Broxbourne and Thatcham.

Identities and social relations are fundamental elements of societies. To approach these topics from a new and different angle, this study takes the human body as the focal point of investigation. It tracks changing identities of early Iron Age people in central Europe through body-related practices: the treatment of the body after death and human representations in art. The human remains themselves provide information on biological parameters of life, such as sex, biological age, and health status. Objects associated with the body in the grave and funerary practices give further insights on how people of the early Iron Age understood life and death, themselves, and their place in the world. Representations of the human body appear in a variety of different materials, forms, and contexts, ranging from ceramic figurines to images on bronze buckets. Rather than focussing on their narrative content, human images are here interpreted as visualising and mediating identity. The analysis of how image elements were connected reveals networks of social relations that connect central Europe to the Mediterranean. Body ideals, nudity, sex and gender, aging, and many other aspects of women’s and men’s lives feature in this book. Archaeological evidence for marriage and motherhood, war, and everyday life is brought together to paint a vivid picture of the past.