archaeology

Book review – Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring It Back

9-minute read
keywords: wildlife conservation

Can the environmental and wildlife conservation movements learn from the (distant) past? This turns out to be a fraught question, with many practitioners preferring to preach pragmatism over nostalgia. Journalist and writer Sophie Yeo agrees that there is no turning back time, but this is no reason to ignore history. In Nature’s Ghosts, she mixes several parts reportage with one part nature writing to both criticize different conservation approaches and showcase some really interesting research. Though centred on the UK, she also discusses projects and problems in Europe and the USA, and the book was deservedly shortlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation[1].

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Book review – The Incredible Journey of Plants

5-minute read
keywords: botany

Italian plant neurobiologist (yes, this is a thing) Stefano Mancuso previously impressed me with The Revolutionary Genius of Plants. With The Incredible Journey of Plants, he has written a captivating collection of vignettes around the subject of plant migration. We tend not to think of plants as moving creatures because they are rooted to the ground. But this, as Mancuso shows, is where we are mistaken.

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Book review – The Science of Middle-Earth: A New Understanding of Tolkien and His World

7-minute read

I will make no secret of my love of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works. Equally, I am always entertained by books looking at the science behind fictional worlds depicted in books, movies, and TV series. The Science of Middle Earth is a remarkable undertaking, with three editors bringing together contributions on a wide range of topics, from humanities such as sociology and philosophy, to natural sciences such as geomorphology, chemistry, and evolutionary biology. Tying it together are Arnaud Rafaelian’s beautiful drawings that immediately draw your attention. Both a serious appreciation of Tolkien’s world and an entertaining work of popular science, this book hit the sweet spot.

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Book review – Vampirology: The Science of Horror’s Most Famous Fiend

6-minute read

You would think that science and monsters are strange bedfellows. And yet, there are plenty of science geeks, myself included, who get a good giggle out of pondering the science behind mythical beings and worlds. Clearly, somebody at the Royal Society of Chemistry has a similar sense of humour, for they have just published Vampirology. Here, chemist and science communicator Kathryn Harkup trains a scientific lens on the fanged fiend—not so much to ask whether vampires do or do not exist, but whether they could exist given our scientific understanding today.

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Book review – Cataclysms: An Environmental History of Humanity

6-minute read

What is the price of humanity’s progress? The cover of this book, featuring a dusty landscape of tree stumps, leaves little to the imagination. In the eyes of French journalist and historian Laurent Testot it has been nothing short of cataclysmic. Originally published in French in 2017, The University of Chicago Press published the English translation at the tail-end of 2020.

Early on, Testot makes clear that environmental history as a discipline can take several forms: studying both the impact of humans on the environment, and of the environment on human affairs, as well as putting nature in a historical context. Testot does all of this in this ambitious book as he charts the exploits of Monkey—his metaphor for humanity—through seven revolutions and three million years.

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Book review – Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

7-minute read

Whatever mental image you have of our close evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, it is bound to be incomplete. Kindred is an ambitious book that takes in the full sweep of 150 years of scientific discovery and covers virtually every facet of their biology and culture. Archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes has drawn on her extensive experience communicating science outside of the narrow confines of academia to write a book that is as accessible as it is informative, and that stands out for its nuance and progressive outlook. Is this a new popular science benchmark?

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Book review – Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings

7-minute read

To figure out how old a tree is, all you have to do is count its rings, and some truly ancient trees grace the pages of this book. But, as tree-ring researcher Valerie Trouet shows, that is the least fascinating thing you can derive from wood. Revealing the inner workings of the academic field formally known as dendrochronology, Tree Story is an immersive jaunt through archaeology, palaeoclimatology, and environmental history. A beautifully written and designed book, it highlights the importance and usefulness of tree rings in reconstructing past climate and linking it to human history.

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Book review – The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate

7-minute read

Since it was coined in the year 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, the term “Anthropocene” has taken the world by storm – pretty much in the same way as the phenomenon it describes. Humanity’s impact on the planet has become so all-encompassing that it warrants giving this period a new name. As a colloquial term that is all snazzy, but are we actually leaving a tangible trace in the rock record to signal a transition to a new period?

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Book review – The Science of Roman History: Biology, Climate, and the Future of the Past

6-minute read

One look at the title and you might be forgiven for quoting John Cleese. But rather than asking what the Romans can do for us, this book asks what we can do for the Romans. Walter Scheidel, who is a professor of humanities as well as classics and history, and a fellow in human biology, brings together a diverse cast of scientists. Their aim? To discuss what relatively young bioscientific disciplines can add to our picture of life in Ancient Rome as revealed so far by the more mature disciplines of history and archaeology. Which disciplines might these be? Prepare yourself for several mouthfuls as this book covers palaeoclimatology, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, palaeopathology, population genetics, and the study of ancient DNA.

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Book review – The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel

This is a travelogue the likes of which you do not find often. It tells of historian David Gange’s audacious journey, kayaking the length of the Atlantic coast of the British Isles over the course of a year. His motivation was to challenge established historical narratives that tend to be land-centric and focused on big cities. Wishing to become a more rounded and responsible historian, he literally immersed himself in a different perspective. The Frayed Atlantic Edge seeks to salvage the histories of coastal and island communities and show they have played a far larger role in British history than they are normally given credit for.

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