The much-lauded ‘new nature writing’ often takes an essentially random plot of land and tells its story to illustrate a wider issue. Less celebrated, perhaps because site reports rarely turn up in your local bookshop, is the way development-led archaeology, when done well, achieves something similar for the historic landscape. A good example is this volume by Chris Evans and colleagues from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU), the land in question lying on the southern outskirts of Cambridge.

This is an area where excavation is proceeding on such a scale that it needs to be recognised as landscape archaeology, albeit in a peculiar form: each intervention made up of fragments, edges and blank zones as much as coherent landscape units. Serendipity is, of course, a key element of commercial archaeology, ranging here from a couple of ring-ditches that, importantly, turned out to be Early Neolithic to an incongruously elaborate Early Anglo-Saxon bed burial. But it is that fragmentation and the search for connections that prompt one of this volume's most notable features: the digressions in time and space that help leaven the roll-call of context numbers and descriptions. This is typical of the volumes produced by the CAU, which have always been smart, in both senses: not only resisting the formulaic but also well produced, including their distinctive red-and-grey colour scheme.

There is the occasional indulgence: for example, the idea, prompted by the discovery of Iron Age tools made of human bone, that British colonialism might have taken a somewhat different path “had the nature of southern Britain's Iron Age then been known—with all the mayhem of its ‘alien’ ritual practices” (p. 271). But in general, the interpretative asides are justified by the nature of a site that contains, for example, half an Iron Age settlement, and lacks Roman activity simply because the adjacent cropmark site was spotted by J.K. St Joseph on one of his pioneering flights and as a result the site was scheduled.

As the cropmark scheduling shows, archaeology in this area did not begin with the Planning and Policy Guidance 16 document. The authors state that “the Cam Valley has, in effect, almost served as the county's Wessex” (p. 4, original emphasis), and the book accordingly pays its dues as part of a series whose title nods to Cyril Fox's (Reference Fox2010) Archaeology of the Cambridge region. Indeed, he is just one of many legendary figures of Cambridgeshire archaeology making cameo appearances, neatly connecting development-led work to earlier endeavours. The volume's premise is the idea that “we write (and analyse) as much in relation to what has been written before as what is in the ground before us” (p. 1). At the same time, the authors acknowledge the impossibility of a comprehensive overview, although one of the reasons given—awaiting the results of Historic England's ‘South-west Cambridgeshire Survey’ project—has now been addressed in a report that attempts to express the complementarity of the aerial view and the excavated evidence (Knight et al. Reference Knight, Last, Evans and Oakey2018).

Nevertheless, some level of synthesis is vital: for example, the lithics from the site only really make sense in the context of a very useful discussion of Neolithic flint scatters across a swathe of south Cambridgeshire. The bigger picture emerges gradually through a number of recurring themes: long-term resonances, the affordances of topography and hydrology and cultural boundaries (the Cam seems to be ‘Border Country’ in several periods). A further factor is scepticism about ‘ritual’ interpretations, especially in relation to the key Early Iron Age pit settlement: “evidence of ritual should not be allowed to outweigh the functional component and why the pits were dug in the first place” (p. 119). This discussion is methodologically sophisticated, drawing on the contents of pit fills to reconstruct the putative midden deposits from which they accrued, identifying those contents “effectively as a by-product” (p. 297). By opposing the ritual and functional in the first place, however, it also seems rather anachronistic, although admittedly this is in response to a previous interpretation of the adjoining part of the site that is characterised as “ritual mania” (p. 298).

In general, the narrative themes satisfy and are underpinned by the detailed description—while it may only be reviewers who read site reports as a whole, rather than simply dipping in for relevant detail, there is good reason not to pass over the small font. For example, the long-lived significance of the Neolithic barrows is emphasised by an Iron Age burial “cut into the main circuit of Monument II […] to face […] into the monument” (p. 154). The book's ‘thick description’ is complemented by a quantitative emphasis that pays off, for example, in the demonstration of how little pottery there is in the Anglo-Saxon deposits compared to the Iron Age ones, and how much animal bone. While the level of detail occasionally threatens to overwhelm understanding, especially in relation to the hundreds of Early Iron Age pits, where patterns are not always self-evident and the authors admit that “the whole thing now risks being too convoluted” (p. 126), this seems a realistic approach to the complexity of lived prehistoric lives, rather than a failure of interpretation: there are no “easy stories” (p. 295). Yet when reading that “A full discussion of the site's ceramic depositional practices is beyond the scope of this study” (p. 202), one wonders where such discussion might occur, if not in a volume of almost 500 pages: this is part of “the ‘challenge of numbers’” that the region's archaeology now faces (p. 28).

A good example of the book's range occurs on p. 178 where the narrative moves straight from microwear analysis to a trans-regional comparison with Ham Hill in Somerset, both in the interests of understanding the treatment of human remains. For all that it tells us about ‘standard’ archaeological concerns such as Neolithic mortuary practice or Iron Age ceramics, perhaps the key contribution of the volume is in showing the possibility of different ways of writing up our sites that tack between scales—the ‘new archaeology writing’?