Bookshelf: A Selection of Recent Publications from UCL Institute of Archaeology

A Selection of Recent Publications from UCL Institute of Archaeology.


Jennifer French and Marion Cutting
The Institute of Archaeology produces two well-established series of books with Routledge: a General Series (series editor Ruth Whitehouse) and the Critical Cultural Heritage sub-series (series editor Beverley Butler).
In addition, the Institute has recently launched a new partnership with BAR Publishing to publish largely unaltered PhD theses. This substantial series is already proving popular and will promote the Institute's outstanding postgraduate research programme across the theory and practice of archaeology, conservation and heritage.
One book in the Critical Cultural Heritage Series has been published since January 2019, with one manuscript in production and two in revision following refereeing for the General Series. A further seven manuscripts are in preparation for refereeing. The first book in the BAR UCL Institute of Archaeology PhD Series has been published, with a further two volumes accepted for imminent publication.

Routledge Series
Colin Sterling. 2019. Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past This book examines the production, consumption and interpretation of photography across various heritage domains, from global image archives to the domestic arena of the family album. Through original ethnographic and archival research, it sheds new light on the role photography has played in the emergence, expansion and articulation of heritage in diverse sociocultural contexts. This book provides fresh insight as to the making and remaking of the past in the present, and the alternative heritages that The research presented in this book advances scholarship on Anglo-Saxon non-elite rural settlements through the analysis of material culture. Forty-four non-elite sites and the high-status site of Staunch Meadow, occupied throughout the Anglo-Saxon period (c. 5 th -11 th centuries) and geographically representative of Anglo-Saxon settlement in England, were selected for study. Comparative analyses of the material culture assemblages and settlement data from these sites were evaluated from four main research perspectives: the archaeological contexts and distributional patterns of material culture at the sites; the range and character of material culture; patterns of material culture consumption; and material culture as evidence for the economic reach of rural settlements.
Many other books have been published by Institute staff between 2018 and 2019. Some of these are featured below.

Giles Dawkes. 2019. Living by the
Creek: Excavations at Kemsley, Sittingbourne, Kent. Archaeology South-East/SpoilHeap Publications Occasional Paper 10 A series of archaeological investigations carried out along the route of the Sittingbourne Northern Relief Road identified a multi-period site dating from the earlier prehistoric to the Roman periods. Most significant was a Roman salt-evaporation hearth or saltern identified on the edge of the marsh, as few have been subject to modern excavation and are a rare find in the region, despite the known importance of the Roman salt-production industry in the Thames estuary.

Julio Escalona, Orri Vésteinsson and Stuart Brookes (Eds). 2019. Polity and Neighbourhood in Early Medieval Europe. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, Medieval Countryside Book 21
How were early medieval people connected to each other and to the wider world? In this collection, archaeologists and historians working in very different areas of early medieval Europe explore diverse evidence-from landscape and burial archaeology to charters and chronicles-to discuss the relationships that constituted neighbourhoods and the roles these played in the processes of state formation that can be observed in the peripheries of the Frankish world.

Emma Lightfoot, Xinyi Liu and Dorian Q Fuller (Eds). 2018. Far from the Hearth: Essays in Honour of Martin K. Jones. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeology Research Monographs
A collection of essays on the archaeology of food and agriculture, including discussions of the origins of agriculture, agricultural ecology, archaeobotanical methods, biomolecular archaeology and agricultural genetics, food and agricultural systems as states of mind, and the globalization of crops across Eurasia in the later Holocene.

Gabriel Moshenska. 2019. Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain. London: Routledge, Material Culture and Modern Conflict Series
This book draws on memory narratives to construct an historical anthropology of childhood in Second World Britain, focusing on objects and spaces such as gas masks, air raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In their struggles to cope with the fears and upheavals of wartime, with families divided and familiar landscapes lost or transformed, children reimagined and reshaped these material traces of conflict into toys, treasures and play grounds.

Giorgos Papantoniou, Demetrios Michaelides and Maria Dikomitou-Eliadou (Eds). 2019. Hellenistic and Roman Terracottas. Leiden: Brill, Monumenta Graeca et Romana Vol. 23
A collection of 29 chapters presenting diverse and innovative approaches in the study of ancient terracottas across the Mediterranean and the Near East, from the Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity. The authors advocate a holistic approach to the study of coroplastic art, which considers terracottas not simply as works of art but also as integral components of ancient material culture. An invaluable companion to ancient terracottas and their associated iconography and technology, as well as in ancient artefacts and classical archaeology in general. with Beakers -the distinctive pottery of Continental origin that was current, predominantly in equally distinctive burials, in Britain from around 2450 BC. Around 300 skeletons were subjected to isotope analysis to explore patterns of mobility and diet, and 150 new radiocarbon dates were obtained. Dental microwear was examined for 64 individuals to provide further information about the food they had eaten, and new information on the sex and age of 201 people obtained. While the genetic data provide convincing evidence for immigration by Continental Beaker users, the isotopic data indicate a more detailed picture of movements, mostly of fairly short distances within Britain, by the descendants of the first Beaker users.

Michael Shapland. 2019. Anglo-Saxon Towers of Lordship. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Anglo-Saxon lords constructed free-standing towers at their residences all across England over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries. This is the first fulllength study of these exceptional buildings, which appear to have had a dual function as buildings of elite worship and symbols of secular power and authority. They persisted into early Norman England, where they appear to have influenced a variety of high-status building types, including the keeps and gatehouses of the earliest stone castles. Between 2010-2013, the Environment Agency undertook the managed realignment of the coastline at Medmerry, impacting on upwards of 60ha of landscape with rich archaeological potential. The opportunity for research offered by the scheme provided a window into the evolution of this distinctive coastal landscape from the earliest period of human settlement in the Bronze Age through to the modern era. The geoarchaeological and palaeoenvironmental programme produced a significant sediment archive, an important contribution to the study of the Manhood Peninsula.