Welcome to the reading room.

We will be making a couple of recommendations a month, and slowly stocking the shelves in our usual industrious manner, but if in the mean time you have any recommendations yourself please feel free to give us a shout using the box at the bottom of the page.

The departments that are ready for perusal are the Neolithic department, the Iron Age department and the Roman Britain department.

A History of Roman Britain, Peter Salway.

Book of the month from the book shop's Roman Britain dept.

The stock lazy bugger phrase 'tour de force' is usualy sufficient to make me exhale disappointment and scorn enough to embarass Napoleon Dynamite. This is however probably one of the few books that deserves the description.
Salway displays his enclyopaedic knowledge of Roman Britain in a suitably erudite fashion, though if this is your first foray into the subject I warn you now - parts of this text require a suitably heroic attention span, and a copy of Penguin's Dictionary of Ancient History wouldn't go amiss either.
That said, if you're interested in the period, this is not an effort you will regret. Highly recommended.

Danebury Hillfort, Barry Cunliffe.

Book of the month from the book shop's Iron Age dept.

Professor Cunliffe has seemingly been excavating Danebury hillfort since it was abandoned by its last occupants. Fortunatley for us however, he is one of the few archaeologists who is as skilled with his pen as he is with his trowel and reports the annual excavations with much aplomb.
For just shy of twenty years, Barry Cunliffe and his team have excavated the hillfort and studied the surrounding landscape. One of the book's greatest attractions is that through concentrating on a tiny spot of the country, Cunliffe manages to paint a social picture on a far broader canvas.

Very readable.

The dig reports are online in PDF format, hosted by the AHDS, here.