Books

Books : reviews

Martin Carver.
The Age of Sutton Hoo: the seventh century in north-western Europe.
Boydell. 1992

Martin Carver.
Sutton Hoo: burial ground of kings?.
British Museum Press. 1998

Martin Carver.
Surviving in Symbols: a visit to the Pictish nation: updated edn.
Berlinn. 2005

Martin Carver.
Portmahomack: monastery of the Picts.
Edinburgh University Press. 2008

Martin Carver.
Archaeological Investigation.
Routledge. 2009

Drawing its numerous examples from around the world, Archaeological Investigation explores the procedures used in field archaeology, travelling over the whole process from discovery to publication.

Divided into four parts, it argues for a set of principles in Part 1, describes work in the field in Part 2 and how to write up in Part 3. Part 4 describes the modern world in which all types of archaeologist operate, academic and professional. The central chapter ‘Projects Galore’ takes the reader on a whirlwind tour through different kinds of investigation including in caves, gravel quarries, towns, historic buildings and underwater.

Archaeological Investigation intends to be a companion for a newcomer to professional archaeology – from a student introduction (Part 1), to first practical work (Part 2) to the first responsibilities for producing reports (Part 3) and in Part 4 to the tasks of project design and heritage curation that provide the meat and drink of the fully-fledged professional.

The book also proposes new ways of doing things, tried out over the author's thirty years in the field and here brought together for the first time. This is no plodding manual but an inspiring, provocative, informative and entertaining book, urging that archaeological investigation is one of the most important things society does.

Martin Carver.
Making Archaeology Happen: design versus dogma.
Left Coast Press. 2011

‘Archaeology is for people’ is the theme of this book. Split between the academic and commercial sectors, archaeological investigation is also deeply embedded in the needs of local communities, making it simultaneously an art, science and social science. Such a multi-disciplinary discipline needs special methods and creative freedom, not repetitive responses. Carver argues that commercial procedures and academic theory are both suffocating creativity in fieldwork. He’d like to see us bring much more diversity and technical ingenuity to every opportunity, and maintains this is more a matter of getting ourselves free of dogma than needing more tine and money. This has many implications for the way archaeology is designed and procured – moving archaeologists up the professional ladder from builder to architect – with contracts based on quality of design, not the price.

Martin Carver, Bisserka Gaydarska, Sandra Montón-Subías.
Field Archaeology from Around the World: ideas and approaches.
Springer. 2015

Martin Carver, Justin Garner-Lehire, Cecily Spall.
Portmahomack on Tarbat Ness: changing ideologies in north-east Scotland, sixth to sixteenth century AD.
Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. 2016

Portmahomack on the Tarbat peninsula overlooking the Dornoch Firth is a fishing village with a 1,500-year-old history. In the sixth and seventh centuary it was a high-ranking centre with monumental cist burials and links to the equestrian class in England. In the eighth century it was a monastery, creating manuscripts and making church vessels and a stunning repertoire of carved stone monuments, its monks looking to Ireland, western Scotland and Northern England for their intellectual alliances. Around 800 AD the monastery came to an end following a Viking raid, but swiftly revived as a manufacturing and trading centre, now serving the protagonists of the Norse-Scottish wars.

By the eleventh century the site was abandoned, but was remembered again in the early twelfth century when it became the parish church of St Colman. In the later middle ages it experienced an upsurge of activity with fishermen and metalsmiths settling beside an enlarged community church. When the Reformation arrived at Portmahomack about 1600, the village moved to the harbour and the old church of St Colman remained on its own, acting for another four hundred years as a weathervane of local society and its beliefs.

Rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1980s, from 1994 to 2007 the site at Portmahomack saw one of the largest research excavations to have taken place in Scotland. Opened by Charles, Prince of Wales, the museum in the church of St Colman’s displays these discoveries and is visited bv people from all over the world.

Martin Carver.
Formative Britain: an archaeology of Britain, fifth to eleventh century AD.
Routledge. 2019

Formative Britain presents an account of the peoples occupying the island of Britain between 400 and 1100 AD, whose ideas continue to set the political agenda today. Forty years of new archaeological research has laid bare a hive of diverse and disputatious communities of Picts, Scots, Welsh, Cumbrian and Cornish Britons, Northumbrians, Angles and Saxons, who expressed their views of this world and the next in a thousand sites and monuments.

This highly illustrated volume is the first book that attempts to describe the experience of all levels of society over the whole island using archaeology alone. The story is drawn from the clothes, faces and biology of men and women, the images that survive in their poetry, the places they lived, the work they did, the ingenious celebrations of their graves and burial grounds, their decorated stone monuments and their diverse messages.

This ground-breaking account is aimed at students and archaeological researchers at all levels in the academic and commercial sectors. It will also inform relevant stakeholders and general readers alike of how the islands of Britain developed in the early medieval period. Many of the ideas forged in Britain’s formative years underpin those of today as the UK seeks to find a consensus programme for its future.