Assessing Iron Age Marsh-Forts: with reference to the stratigraphy and palaeoenvironment surrounding The Berth, North Shropshire. By Shelagh Norton. 290mm. Pp viii + 211, 109 ills (many col), 13 tabs, 3 app. Archaeopress, Oxford, 2021. isbn 9781789698633. £38 (pbk).

Abstract

aerial photographic archive, which consists of the -odd digitised air photographs of the Bradford collection. John Bradford (–) was a photo interpretation officer in the British Army Intelligence Corps. The photographs were selected from a vast collection of aerial photographs taken shortly before the start of the Allied invasion of mainland Italy in September . These added to an already significant archive produced during the earlier Sicily campaign. With the exception of a series of oblique photographs taken by Bradford and Peter Williams-Hunt, the intention of which was to record archaeology, the original purpose of these images was military. The structure of this volume begins with an introduction to the Bradford archive in Chapter , before covering eight regions, one per chapter: Region , Lucera; Region , Upper Celone/Foggia southwest; Region , Upper Cervaro/Castelluccio; Region , Cerignola West; Region , Lago Salpi/ Zapponeta south; Region , Lower Celine/ Foggia northeast; Region , Candelaro/ Amendola; and Region , San Severo. It concludes with a bibliography and index of sites. There is considerable overlap across the two volumes: the mapping and georeferencing of the sites in volume  are central to the work described in volume , while information derived from work in the field is included in site descriptions in volume . This provides a smooth transition back and forth between the two books. Traditionally, Tavoliere field research has focused primarily on site typology, social hierarchy and artefact types; however, these publications differ markedly in their approach. Bringing together a pair of volumes of this magnitude, covering such a period of fieldwork, is a significant undertaking in its own right. To do this with such an original, and in places ground-breaking, methodology is exceptional. Their development and application of field methods of sensory archaeology are foundational, and the co-existence of a plethora of traditional and interpretative fieldwork regimes is both ambitious and impressive. The diagrams are fresh and the aerial photographs are stunning. There are very few areas of weakness; however, one minor point is that in places the object photography has some fairly significant shadows. Referencing is extensive and broad in scope. The work concludes that the world of the villaggi trincerati was maintained and regenerated as a series of socially nested scales of settlement that allowed uptake of new land and expanding populations without the emergence of hierarchical organisational structures. As one might expect, the opportunity is taken to suggest future work and sites to be investigated, as the team continues to contextualise their phenomenological investigations of this hugely significant landscape. Overall, these volumes are highly sophisticated, beautifully written and make an important contribution to our understanding of it.