Richard Morris is probably best known as a former Director of the Council for British Archaeology, but he has had a long and distinguished career as an archaeologist in many other guises since his days as a digger at York Minster in the early 1970s. This book finds Richard Morris in reflective mood, looking back on that career and his early life. In Time’s Anvil he introduces us to a series of topics relating to archaeology and social history which have captured his interest and, as his title implies, his imagination.

The book begins with an introduction that deals with conceptions of time, of the essence to archaeology of course. This is followed by Part 1, which is concerned with the emergence of prehistory as a discipline and the origins of archaeological method. Part 2 discusses human origins and landscape change in early prehistory. We skip the Romans – Morris clearly had enough of them when digging in York – and in Part 3 we move on to the Anglo-Saxon to Tudor periods, visiting medieval villages, the origins of Anglo-Saxon England (notably at West Heslerton), the medieval Church and the Rose Theatre, which serves as a starting point for a discussion of the history of plays and entertainments. Part 4 is concerned with the archaeology of warfare in the post-medieval and modern periods and Part 5 deals largely with aspects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the last, concluding, chapter seeks to identify some common threads in the way humanity has interacted with the landscape from earliest times to the present day.

This is a stimulating book full of ideas sadly far too numerous to discuss in a short review. As far as readership is concerned, I suspect Morris may have been more concerned about getting everything off his chest than sales figures. However, I will be recommending Time’s Anvil to anyone, students especially, seeking an introduction to the sort of problems archaeologists think about and why, with its great time depth and vast range of subject matter, archaeology, more than any other discipline, goes to the heart of what it means to be human. Hitherto, I have recommended Mortimer Wheeler’s Archaeology from the Earth (Reference Wheeler1954) and Philip Rahtz’s Invitation to Archaeology (Reference Rahtz1985), the former a generation apart from the latter, which is, in turn, a generation from Time’s Anvil. Prompted by Morris’s book to think about the three of them, I find that each one, up to a point, reflects something of its respective Zeitgeist. Wheeler has the practical self-confidence of the dominant social class that won the war. Rahtz has the quirky and engaging enthusiasm of a Britain resurgent under Margaret Thatcher. Richard Morris apparently began work on Time’s Anvil in 2000, but has, in the end, given us a book for a recession and its aftermath, when we have become only too aware that humanity’s prosperity and happiness does not necessarily increase on a continuing upward curve.

Throughout Time’s Anvil I detected a mood of anxiety; for example, about the destiny of the human race itself. On p 142 Morris wonders whether we, Homo sapiens, really are ‘in some way exceptional’ and suggests, in reply, that ‘despite our hubris, we are just another species … our rapid increase in population akin to a vast algal bloom’. Secondly, he is worried about whether we are really getting to grips with, to use Wheeler’s words, ‘what matters in archaeology’ (Alms for Oblivion, Reference Wheeler1966). I found the chapter on the world wars particularly thought-provoking in this respect. For example, referring to the study of wartime fortifications, Morris goes back to basics and asks us: ‘why do we study such remains?’; especially, he points out, as they are so well documented and ‘we do not need archaeology to tell us that the Battle of Arras was a slaughter’. He then asks: ‘should we study them?’ His concern, I think, is that as the wars are still so close to us in time, then, notwithstanding the great public interest (which archaeologists themselves have done a good deal to arouse), it is impossible to address their study objectively and in the more morally neutral manner in which we study earlier periods. A legal dispute over an architectural detail of the Auschwitz gas chambers is cited as a case in point. I have not had to deal with anything so grim, but I have felt uneasy about the showbiz atmosphere of some TV shows on wartime archaeology. So there you are Richard, you have got me started on discussing just one of the many ideas in your super book and I am now over my word limit and must stop, but let me conclude by saying that we need more books like this from our archaeological colleagues – take a break from the site reports, guys, and tell us what you really think!