Synopses & Reviews
Volume I(2) contains a series of chapters originally planned to accompany within a single volume a comprehensive gazetteer of Wiltshire's prehistoric remains. In the event the gazetteer was published as Volume I(1) in 1957 and the chapters are now ap-pearing after a considerable lapse of time. Although the chapters are based largely upon the evidence contained in the gazet-teer, the authors have taken account of relevant excavations and research under- taken since 1957. The first five chapters tell the story from the beginning of human settlement until the end of the final phase of bronze technology, and they take, so far as archaeological evidence permits, a narra-tive form: thus some monuments with long life-spans, such as Stonehenge and Avebury, appear and re-appear as the chronological account unfolds. Those chapters cover a period for which the Wiltshire evidence is of great significance; they are written by Professor Stuart Piggott, whose long and close acquaintance with the antiquities of Wiltshire has enabled him to enter into considerable detail and often to set the local evidence against a continental or wider British background. Six chapters follow taking the story from the early pre-Roman Iron Age down to the end of the Roman era. Here the nature of the evidence makes a narrative style easier to adopt. The growing complexity of the settlement form is traced from the single enclosed farmstead of the early Iron Age to the hamlets and even small villages of the Roman period. The steady course of Romanization in Wiltshire is traced until its eventual collapse and the British victory at Mount Badon. A final chapter deals with the Pagan Saxon period, using archaeological, documentary, and place- name evidence; it gives special attention to that impressive but enigmatic earthwork known on its Wiltshire course as the East Wansdyke. Numerous line illustrations have been drawn specially for the volume.
Synopsis
Boydell & Brewer are pleased to announce that as from 1 December 2001 they will be distributing the Victoria County History, which has an international reputation as a work of reference for English local history. Begun in 1899, the publication of about three new volumes each year is gradually creating an encyclopedic history of the counties, ranging from earliest times to the present. For each county there is or is planned a set of volumes, containing general chapters on subjects such as prehistory and ecclesiastical and economic history, and topographical chapters giving a comprehensive, fully referenced account of each city, town and village in the county. Fourteen county sets have been completed; work is in progress on a further thirteen.