Book Deal!

I am uncommonly pleased to announce that a contract for the preparation of a publication has been cordially agreed between Amberley Publishing of Stroud and myself.

The book, currently titled The Archaeology of Postholes: Reconstructing Prehistoric Buildings, will have 60,000 words, with 130 illustrations, and while advance order lines will be waiting to take your call, I’d give it a couple of weeks, as I haven’t written it yet.
Many thanks to Miles Russell for his good offices.
This is the basic synopsis for the book which I developed last February. It will cover many of the topics covered so far on Theoretical Structural Archaeology, but with a linear rather than episodic narrative structure, and it will require a new set of black and white illustrations.

30. Not going with the flow

I studied philosophy, so I know you are reading this, or at least you think you are, but I don’t know why, or whether you have done it before, and if so, how often. If you have read none of the proceeding 42,000 words, what I am about to discuss may seem a little unexpected, but I am trying not to repeat myself, and besides, those who have bravely trudged through it all deserve some reward, so I am going to give a brief glimpse of what's coming up in the next 30 posts, because from now on it’s going to get ‘interesting’. In terms of ‘why I blog’, this is my belated contribution to an interesting Internet discussion.[1] It also reflects my concerns about how I blog.
So, before we go any further, it's important we have a heart to heart about what’s going on here. We are meeting in rather unusual circumstances; my concern is what is going on in your mind when you read this, and you may be beginning to wonder about what’s going on in mine.

19. The proper study of mankind is postholes

With all due apologies to Alexander Pope [1], and John Collis [2], postholes are quite important, but it is what they represent, the prehistoric built environment, that gives them their significance to archaeology.

An excavated posthole

The central importance of the built environment to archaeology, to its original inhabitants, and to builders was explored in a series of earlier articles, as was the basic problem of archaeological sites with lots of postholes that, once any roundhouses have been extracted, remain uninterpreted.

18. Credibility Crunch Hits Iron Age Building

The story of the Iron Age building boom of the later Twentieth Century starts with one man, Gerhard Bersu [left], driven to these shores by that most clichéd of archaeological plot devices, the Nazis. It is his initial speculations and concept of a roundhouse that has dominated thinking for seventy years. The concept has become an article of faith for many archaeologists, who, perhaps unwittingly, show a near religious belief in the veracity of his ideas about buildings.

However, religion and archaeology are unsatisfactory bedfellows, and anyone who has read articles 1-9 on this site will realise that I think it is time to return to the evidence and common sense, and to prick this aged speculative bubble.

5. Roundhouses and other circular arguments

One the most fundamental and frustrating truths about archaeological excavation, tacitly accepted by practitioners, is that on most sites, a significant number of features will never be properly understood or explained.


The 1939 Little Woodbury excavation has proved to be a watershed for many aspects of archaeology of Southern England, not least because Bersu could explain and interpret the majority of the features he found, and in so doing provided the first model of the built environment of prehistoric Britain.