home > book reviews > Michael Pitts
Google > Michael Pitts


Books

Books : reviews

Michael Pitts, Mark Roberts.
Fairweather Eden: life in Britain half a million years ago as revealed bythe excavations at Boxgrove.
Arrow. 1998

‘Europe’s oldest man has been found in southern England.’ Thus The Times broke the news of the discovery of a fossil shin bone, at Boxgrove in Sussex, that went on to make headlines around the world.

This is the heady story of over ten years of excavation at the world’s best preserved early human site, told through the experiences of those who were there. Mark Roberts and his team opened a unique window on life in Britain half a million years ago. As the dig reached its thrilling climax, they uncovered evidence that questioned who we are and where we came from. Boxgrove Man lived in a warm period of the Ice Age, a ‘fairweather Eden’ with lions and elephants. Was he the simple-minded scavenger traditionally envisaged by archaeologists, or the primitive beast of popular imagination? The answers from Boxgrove astonished archaeologists.

Michael Pitts.
Hengeworld.
Arrow. 2000

As famous as it is mysterious, Stonehenge lies at the heart of our imagined past. Nearby at Avebury is one of the most extraordinary ancient religious landscapes. For the first time in over 40 years, an archaeologist close to both sites presents the story from the inside. Starting at the excavation that followed the collapse of a Stonehenge megalith on the last night of the 19th century, and ending with a dramatic discovery in Avebury at the close of the 20th, Hengeworld tells how recent archaeology has revolutionised the way we think about these great stone circles and the people who built them. Finally, Pitts shows a pattern emerging from the archaeology of these sites which explains the relationship between them and reconstructs the ceremony that would have symbolised this.

Michael Pitts.
Digging up Britain: a new history in ten extraordinary discoveries.
Thames & Hudson. 2019

Britain has long been fascinated with its own history and identity, as an island nation besieged by invaders from beyond the seas: the Romans, Vikings and Normans. The long saga of prehistory is often forgotten – but our understanding of our past is changing.

Mike Pitts presents ten astounding archaeological discoveries that shed new light on those who came before us, and radically altered the way we think about our history. His compelling, sometimes teasing, archaeological odyssey illustrates the diversity, complexity and sheer strangeness of the lives that represent Britain’s past.

Michael Pitts.
How to Build Stonehenge.
Thames & Hudson. 2022

Icon of the New Stone Age, sculptural and engineering marvel, symbol of national pride: there is nothing quite like Stonehenge. These great sarsen and bluestone slabs, arranged with simple, graphic genius, attract visitors from across the world. The monument stands silent in the face of the questions its unlikely existence raises: who built it? Why? How?

There has been endless speculation about why Stonehenge was built, inspiring theories ranging from the academically credible to the improbable, but far less investigation into how. In the millennia since its creation, pieces of Stonehenge have been knocked over by heavy machinery, found their way to Florida (and back again), and been exposed to radioactive sodium, but the seemingly impossible endeavour of raising the stones with Neolithic technology has remained inexplicable – until now.

In the past decade ground-breaking discoveries, made possible by cutting-edge scientific techniques, have traced the precise provenance of the bluestones in Wales, but can we plot their journeys to the Salisbury Plain? And how might teams of labourers lacking machinery or even pack animals have dragged them 200 miles to the site? How did they carve joints into the sarsen boulders, among the hardest stones in the world, and then raise them into place? Mike Pitts draws on a lifetime’s study to answer these questions, revealing how Stonehenge stood not in austere isolation, as we see it today, but as part of a wider world, the focus of a megalithic cosmology of belief, ritual and creativity.