Pitts Mike. Digging Up Britain: Ten Discoveries, a Million Years of History

Thames and Hudson, 2019. — 304 p.An up-to-the-minute account of ten of the most exciting archaeological discoveries in Britain over the past decade.Britain has long been obsessed with its own history and identity, an island nation besieged by invaders from beyond the seas. The long saga of prehistory is often forgotten, but our understanding of our past is changing. In the last decade, astounding archaeological discoveries have shed new light on those who have gone before us, radically altering the way we think about our history. Mike Pitts presents ten of the most exciting – and surprising – of these discoveries.As Pitts leads us on this journey through time, we move from the more recent and familiar to the most remote and bizarre, just as archaeologists delving into the earth find themselves moving backwards through the years until they reach the very oldest remnants of the past. At each of these sites we hear from the people who have found and recovered these ancient remains. We follow the archaeologists as they unearth an ancient Britain of many different cultures, and their efforts to understand them aided by new sciences including DNA analysis. Some are major digs, carried out to rescue and record heritage sites before they are covered over by new developments. Others are chance finds, leading to revelations out of proportion to the scale of the original projects. All are extraordinary tales of both luck and cutting-edge archaeological science that have produced profound, and often unexpected, insights into people’s lives between a thousand and a million years ago. Digging Up Britain offers a vision of antiquity for a modern British identity.Mike Pitts is a writer and broadcaster who began as a professional archaeologist and museum curator, directing excavations at Stonehenge. He has written for the Times, Telegraph, Sunday Times, Guardian, New Scientist, BBC History Magazine and other papers and magazines, and continues to conduct original archaeological research and publish in peer-reviewed journals. He is editor of the Council for British Archaeology's magazine, British Archaeology, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries