I have a great job: as Reviews Editor at the journal Antiquity, books on subjects ranging from early hominins to today’s car cemeteries pass through my hands. So what do I look for in a book? To my mind three ingredients make a good archaeological book: its subject has to be rooted in the core […]

I chose this book because it covers one of the most interesting and important periods of human prehistory, the origins and expansion of anatomically modern humans from Africa into the rest of the world. Few topics have responded so readily to the wide range of disciplines that can now focus on one issue and in […]

The discovery of an unidentified and unexplained mummy, labelled Unknown Man E, in the Royal Cache tomb in Ancient Thebes, prompted the author to write this fascinating and informative book. If you are into mummies, this is definitely one for you, covering as it does comprehensive yet highly accessible and evocative descriptions of the individual […]

This is the book of the British Museum exhibition – a dazzling, kaleidoscopic view of the clay figurines of the earliest farmers of Jomon Japan. Fascinating essays show how these figurines have shaped modern Japanese culture and particularly its celebrated manga (cartoon) artists. More to the point, with its ravishing photographs of these hand-made, plastic […]

Visitors to Johannesburg can visit, in the grounds of the University of Witwatersrand, the outstanding Origins Centre. In this book the Centre’s Curator, Geoff Blundell, draws together 19 fascinating contributions that deal with our emergence and development in Africa over a seven million year period. What the Origins Centre achieves through video, artefacts and sound, […]

And now for something completely different… the title might be a bit off-putting but the principal author, Chris Evans, is one of the most original minds in contemporary archaeology and how often does a shaman figure as a serious co-author of an archaeological work ? This book is a summary of almost ten years fieldwork […]

This is a novel set in the reign of Tutankhamun, but also about Howard Carter’s work in Egypt, his partnership with Lord Carnarvon and their discovery of the king’s tomb.The author has taken the known facts and woven a very plausible and believable story around them, after considerable and painstaking research. I especially liked the […]

In 1907 two great Welsh institutions were founded – the National Library and the National Museum. One year later a third was established – The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. It has adapted gracefully and successfully to the rapidly changing circumstances of the last two decades and is therefore with […]

Visitors to the Wellcome Collection in London’s Euston Road cannot fail to be intrigued by the man behind it, the American-born pharmaceutical entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Henry Wellcome. At his death in 1936, he owned a grotesquely overwhelming collection of objects, the variety and quantity of which the world had never seen. Warehoused and largely […]

Produced to mark the 10th anniversary of the open-air Palaeolithic art of Portugal’s Côa Valley becoming a World Heritage site, this beautiful book comprises numerous fantastic colour photos (mostly taken at night) and equally remarkable colour tracings of hundreds of figures, not only from the Côa Valley but also from the ever-growing list of similar […]