British Archaeology, no 19, November 1996: Reviews

ROMAN BATH
Barry Cunliffe
Batsford, UKP15.99
ISBN 0-7134-7893-4 pb

In the 12 years since the previous edition of this book was published as Roman Bath Discovered, archaeological discovery in Bath has been going on apace. However, only an attentive reader of this latest version would realise this. The book has been updated, but also considerably shortened. More has had to go into less here, and it shows.

What is good is the skilful narrative by Prof Barry Cunliffe, who has excavated extensively in Bath. The core of the book is a clear and readable description of the baths themselves, their development and their discovery. In the chapter on the rest of the town, `Aquae Sulis, Spa or Town?', Cunliffe fails to answer the question, but makes a claim for the achievement of administrative status. His chapter on the people of Roman Bath is particularly well done, extending from priests and senior centurions to the poorer men and women, residents and visitors. He bases this largely on the exceptional epigraphic evidence from Bath, both in stone and in the curses from the Sacred Spring, and a real flavour emerges of actual people and their concerns.

Work since 1986 is rather skimmed over. Much more evidence is available for the northern `suburbs' than is implied here, and for major changes in the later 2nd century in the centre of the town. As he writes, there were probably two foci in the development of Aquae Sulis, but the evidence is much stronger than he allows. More is also known of the later Iron Age in the Bath area - for example, settlements only 1km west of the baths, and in the valley bottom between Bathampton Down and Little Solsbury Hillforts.

Peter Davenport is the Director of Excavations at the Bath Archaeological Trust

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF SKYE AND THE WESTERN ISLES
Ian Armit
Edinburgh, UKP14.95
ISBN 0-7486-0640-8

Only 60 years ago archaeologists used to visit the Hebrides because they considered them a cultural backwater, where they could see in the present how Ancient Britons might have lived. These early archaeologists visited and excavated the impressive remains of Neolithic chambered tombs and Iron Age brochs and wheelhouses, which they interpreted as far too sophisticated to have been built by the indigenous inhabitants of these remote islands. This book by Ian Armit, formerly of Edinburgh University's Field Unit but now at Historic Scotland, shows that this patronising thinking has gone. Drawing on the results of recent work, much of it his own, Armit presents a fascinating story of a rich archaeological heritage from Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to medieval Lords of the Isles.

In this splendid book, illustrated with Alan Braby's reconstruction drawings, we find example after example of the kinds of sites that most archaeologists would give their eye-teeth to find. There are waterlogged Neolithic settlements, Early Bronze Age houses, massive Iron Age buildings still standing, and Viking longhouses and burials. There is also a diverse material culture of pottery, bone, antler and wooden artefacts, remarkable conditions of preservation, and some of the most impressive archaeological landscapes in the British Isles. Our knowledge is advancing so fast that Armit's hope that the book will become obsolete is already coming true. The missing Late Bronze Age settlements have now been found, Viking houses have been excavated, and the settlement sites from the medieval period to the infamous Clearances are being explored.

This is a book which attacks conventional wisdom. Armit asks how archaeologists are to understand long-term change if they are unable to work beyond the narrow confines of their `chronological ghettos'. He explores the complex warp and weft of continuity and change in which certain aspects of place changed little over millennia whilst dramatic changes in language, material culture and power relations swept through the islands. The Hebrides are one of those places where the constant re-use of earlier sites and the inter-penetration of past and present force archaeologists to investigate the full sequence of prehistory and history. Another casualty is the notion that the Western Isles and Skye, sitting astride seaways that linked Ireland with Scotland and western Britain with Scandinavia, were marginal to the main currents of northern Europe's prehistory.

Dr Mike Parker Pearson is a Lecturer in Archaeology at Sheffield University, and has excavated recently at various sites in the Hebrides