The University College London Field Archaeology Unit has been focusing a great deal of attention on reconstructing medieval settlements. With the aid of the Kent County Council's ordinance requiring that any construction or demolition be preceded by an archaeological evaluation, the team was able to gain access to land owned by Brett Gravel Ltd. in and around Romney Marsh that was destined to become a gravel quarry (Lydd Quarry). There they were able to discover, map, and (minimally and selectively) excavate a series of discontinuous settlements that have produced a wealth of information on land reclamation, subsistence settlement, and the economy in an isolated but potentially economically useful area, from about the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries.

The present volume pulls together and updates a large number of unpublished reports and data collections from the excavations themselves and links them to document searches in both printed collections and archives, mostly in London and in Kent. The result is an analysis that is both comprehensive and tantalizingly unfinished: comprehensive in that the report not only catalogs all of the material remains but also places them in the larger history of lordship and settlement in Romney Marsh and its environs; tantalizingly unfinished because only a small portion of the area was able to be fully excavated before the gravel company completed its job of extraction, which resulted (of course) in the obliteration of the site. The team did not know whether the sites they had chosen would reveal what they hoped to find; there are references throughout the text to regrets that more thorough excavations could not have been completed.

Finds dating from premedieval eras also came to light in the excavations, in particular, evidence of Bronze Age settlements, which were probably temporary or seasonal, and of Romano-British-era use of Romney Marsh as a saltworks. One portion of the site revealed the skeletal remains of two whales that seem to have been either stranded or washed ashore sometime between the ninth and the eleventh centuries; these are described as “the first unequivocal archaeological evidence for the exploitation of whale meat in Anglo-Saxon England” (105).

The principle era of habitation, land reclamation, and environmental exploitation, however, was the thirteenth century; after this a series of catastrophic floods (the worst of which occurred in 1288) and the disasters of the Great Famine and the Black Death rendered the area less attractive for anything other than a rough pasture for cattle and sheep. Excavations revealed that the terrain was reshaped to a very significant degree several times by a series of dikes and ditches that drained the water from specific fields, which, combined with the exposed shingle banks that rose above the marsh, provided adequate land for both arable farming and animal husbandry and stable foundations for wattle-and-daub buildings. These latter were, however, extremely difficult to locate. The most extensively excavated section of Lydd Quarry revealed no structures that could be identified with certainty as centers of human habitation but did reveal a large number of rubbish pits that contained the refuse of human activity. As stated in the concluding section, “the absence of good structural evidence at the occupation site poses a number of problems. If a proper settlement occupied more or less permanently leaves no structural traces, … how is it to be differentiated from an ‘activity area’ without permanent occupation?” (286). How indeed? Fortunately, the charter evidence from the ecclesiastical overlords of the region suggests that there were permanent settlements in the region. Locating them would, however, have required excavating the entire site: something that the gravel company, which was paying for the excavations and even loaning the archaeologists their earthmoving equipment, was unable to do. Instead, the authors used the material remains—including pottery, ferrous and nonferrous metals, and plant and animal remains—to suggest that, even in this almost uninhabitable terrain, medieval people seem to have settled, and some even to have prospered, until both the climate and the economic circumstances of the fourteenth century discouraged the maintenance of a permanent settlement. From the mid-fourteenth to the nineteenth century, Lydd's terrain was again reengineered, through extensive infilling of ditches, into pasturage for cattle and sheep, and arable farming was abandoned.

As an archaeological excavation report, this book is extremely thorough and analytically cautious: just what it should be. As a work of history, it is somewhat less satisfying, more because of its organization than any lack of evidential analysis. The introductory chapters, by Sheila Sweetinburgh, present a great deal of information that is not addressed in the same historical fashion until the concluding chapter. The individual excavation reports of the finds, which are very technical and densely written, lie in between these two sections. As a historian, I would have found it easier to read the entire narrative all the way through and then turn to the reports. Another problem is that the figures are divided between those that exist in the text itself and those that, for some inexplicable reason, are appended to the back of the book, beyond the index, on unnumbered pages. This would not necessarily be a problem, if the figures at the end were not numbered contiguously with those in the text (e.g., figs. 1 and 2 are in the text, but fig. 3 is at the end; fig. 4 appears in the text; etc.). The inclusion of an asterisk preceding the figure number of those located at the back of the book was unhelpful because there was no note in the text telling the reader that this is what the asterisk was designed to indicate. Despite these quibbles, this is a book worthy of being taken seriously, not only as an exemplary report of a significant archaeological find but also as a genuine historical study that can provide fodder for further research on both the region of the Kentish coastal marshes in the Middle Ages and the peasant communities who lived there.