This is another quietly evangelising publication, priced to ensure a wide circulation and written by the leading experts in their field, part of whose purpose is to alert non metallurgists (NMs) to the sorts of thing that get metallurgists (Ms) excited so that NMs across the archaeological community can help Ms identify sites and material that can provide answers to questions of fundamental importance to Ms.

It is astonishing to think that this two-volume report, the definitive account of Roger Mercer’s excavations at Hambledon Hill between 1974 and 1986, has only just been published when the results of those excavations have in fact influenced the thinking of every archaeologist who has ever worked on a Neolithic causewayed enclosure over the last 30 years. That is partly because this isn’t Roger Mercer’s first account.

Nothing is as good as a question to establish the theme of a book. But in this case the question is not just answered by trawling through historical records to establish which wealthy patrons sought to bribe St Peter by sponsoring the construction of one of England’s finest churches: our authors are just as concerned with identifying the horny handed carpenters and masons who were the physical builders.

This is an excellent book about a subject so fundamental to archaeological field practice that nobody should be let loose on an excavation unless they have read it. Human remains are everywhere, and this book tells us what we need to know about the laws relating to finds of human remains, and how to excavate, conserve, store and curate skeletal remains.

Many archaeologists regard Druids with disdain, as cranks or romantics who claim to have roots deep in the ancient past, but whose practices are largely invented in relatively recent times. This may be so, but archaeologists and Druids share a huge amount of DNA: certainly in the early years of the 18th century, it was difficult to tell an archaeologist (or more strictly an antiquary) and a Druid apart.

Tuscany is famous for handsome villas set in elevated positions overlooking formal gardens of clipped box that give way to an increasingly wild landscape of water and woodland and terminating in a borrowed view of distant hills or peaks. The pattern is formulaic and deliberate, and is linked to complex ideas about the relationship between nature and artifice that is also found in the poetry and art of the period.

Coming to a library near you soon (one hopes, given the investment involved in owning a copy) is the third volume in David Neal and Stephen Cosh’s project to create the first complete corpus of Roman mosaics of Britain.

Bryony Coles gave the name ‘Doggerland’ to the drowned landscape beneath the North Sea in her 1998 paper in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society summing up all that was then known about the archaeology of an area better known for oil rigs and fishing. It is thanks in part to oil exploration and aggregates prospecting that we have a far richer picture ten years on, because the authors of this present volume have been able to reuse a mass of seismic data generated for mapping mineral deposits to reconstruct an area of lost Mesolithic landscape at least as big as the UK, stretching, at its maximum extent, beyond the Low Countries, Germany and Denmark to Sweden and the Baltic coast.

This Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology Monograph derives from a conference held in 2008 at Leicester University with the aim of stopping what the editors describe as the disturbing and potentially harmful fragmentation of post-Medieval archaeology into factions.

Robin Birley set out to excavate the entirety of the Vindolanda fort and associated civilian settlement on Hadrian’s Wall in 1970, calculating that the task would take him 20 years. Some 36 years on, he now thinks the task will take at least another 100 years of dedicated work.

While planning a book on the castles of Herefordshire, Terry Wardle came across references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to a castle built in 1051 by a Norman named Osbern.

The manor house, six labourer’s cottages and a church are all that now survive above ground of one of Hertfordshire’s smallest parishes, but plenty of earthworks survived to hint at a much larger Medieval settlement until 1973, when ploughing began to erode the site rapidly and a five year rescue excavation was set in train.

Parts of English Heritage could be likened to a private university in that some lucky members of staff (and their advisors and consultants) get to do the kind of primary research that even university academics struggle to find time for these days. Much of this research is used to inform the preservation and presentation of the properties in the agency’s care, and this third volume of the annual Historical Review is thus largely a reflection of current priorities: Kenilworth Castle, Apethorpe Hall and Chiswick House, for example, all subject to current conservation programmes.

Paul Wilkinson’s beginner’s guide to practical archaeology comes with a solid endorsement from Mick Aston (‘I wish this book had been available when I started in archaeology’), and is selling very well, which reflects the demand that there is for a good primer, even in this era of constraint on volunteer archaeology.

Whoever coined the term ‘the Dark Ages’ must have been an archaeologist, because the literary record for the post-Roman period is far from sparse. Stuart Laycock (author of Britannia: the failed state, nominated for the Current Archaeology Book of the Year Award 2009) is one of a growing number of archaeologists who have begun to realise this and have, as a result, been raiding the territory of the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic departments to see what we can learn from Gildas, Beowulf, Bede, the Historia Brittonum, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ancient Welsh poetry and sub-Latin funerary inscriptions.

The editors state in their introduction that ‘we have encouraged the contributors [to this book] to develop their own points of view ... to show the plurality of archaeology ... [and to give] ... some sense of the excitement, possibility and controversy of archaeological practices and results’. They have succeeded superbly, and though this Oxford ‘handbook’ has the bulk, size and weight of an encyclopaedia, it is refreshingly free of the encyclopaedia’s dry approach to the topic, consisting instead of 35 lively essays on the origins and development of the discipline of archaeology, the practice of archaeology, human origins, migration and survival strategies, and the development of culturally complex societies.

This collection of essays reprinted from Merry Meet magazine (‘an independent quarterly journal of folklore and paganism’) begins with a disarming introduction in which the author, answering the charge that modern Paganism is a made-up religion, pleads guilty. But, he says, the modern Pagan revival is rooted in the findings of archaeologists and folklorists, and he then delivers 28 essays on places, landscapes, myth, folk song, dance and traditional ceremonies, such as the Lewes Bonfire Procession, that are well researched and factually accurate – you will find wilder leaps of fantasy in some ‘respectable’ archaeological publications.

The author of this guide to the prehistoric and Roman sites in the boulder-clay lands of Essex and south Suffolk wants us to go out and look at the landscape and develop a feel for the archaeological dimension, to which too many people are blind. From a train window, do you see grass and trees, or do you see 12,000 years or more of post-glacial shaping in which every element – including those trees and that grass – can be given a date and a history? Getting to the stage where you can read the landscape intelligently takes time and training, and most people start by getting to know one patch very well.

Pamela Jane Smith’s book is about the rise of prehistoric archaeology as an academic discipline and the inception of the world’s first formal honours degree course in archaeology, which occurred at Cambridge in 1915.