Book review: Thames through Time: The Archaeology of the Gravel Terraces of the Upper and Middle Thames. The Formation and Changing Environment of the Thames Valley and Early Human Occupation to 1500 BC

This is the third volume in the series ‘The Thames through Time’, funded from the recently terminated Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund (ALSF), which (being one of Gordon Brown’s better ideas) was a resource for much valuable Quaternary and Holocene research. This series comes under the heading of ‘outreach’ within the ALSF brief, its stated purpose being to ‘provide an accessible and up-to-date synthesis of the large quantity of archaeological data recovered over more than a century of quarrying and other development on the gravel terraces of the River Thames’ (from the Preface by Anne Dodd, p. xviii). Previous volumes in the series have covered the period 1500 bc to ad 1000 (Booth et al., 2007; Lambrick et al., 2009). The present volume, of >500 pages, is really two 250-page books spliced together: Part 1, on the Ice Age, is by the first three authors; Part 2, ‘Mesolithic to Early Bronze Age’ is by the other five. The wisdom of this amalgamation could perhaps be questioned, since the topics do not greatly overlap and are generally studied by different sets of researchers, be they archaeologists or Earth scientists. This distinction will matter less, however, to the non-professional audience at whom the work is largely targeted, which is not to say that there isn’t plenty of value here to the professional, to the academic and, indeed, to students at all levels. Part 2 is clearly of more relevance in the context of The Holocene.

As a general comment, the volume is beautifully presented, with a hard cover, good quality paper and copious illustration, much of it in colour. Indeed, many diagrams can be recognized as coloured versions of previously published black-and-white figures. While these are invariably attractive they are not always improvements on the originals in terms of clarity and some might, somewhat churlishly, be stated to use colour without any good reason. Happily there are numerous superb line drawings of artefacts in black-and-white, although the colour photographs of stone tools are also worthy of note, being of magnificent quality. One grumble concerns a series of new coloured palaeogeography maps of the Thames produced for Part 1, depicting the river’s supposed course during different marine oxygen isotope stages. Sadly these are highly generalized and therefore inaccurate in detail, for example ignoring the well-documented z-shaped looping course that the Lower Thames followed in the Purfleet–Dartford area in the first half of the late Middle Pleistocene. This is strange, since the correct course is readily apparent from the BGS mapping that is used elsewhere (and the first author is a BGS officer) and the loop at Purfleet appears elsewhere in the volume, so there is internal inconsistency. Another irritation was the necessity of delving into a dense five-page unformatted list of figure credits to find the sources of the various diagrams and images, for which no such information appears in the captions. Furthermore the index was found to be of limited value when tested with a number of different searches.

Although the division into two parts is flagged on the cover of the volume, as well as in the contents, in the book itself there is continuity between the two parts without any indication of anything other than a new chapter beginning. Chapters 1–7 belong to Part 1 and Chapters 8–16 to Part 2. In many ways Chapters 6 and 7 could be regarded as linking the two parts, since these are on ‘The middle and late Devensian (MIS 3–2)’ and ‘The terminal Pleistocene–early Holocene transition (MIS 2–1)’ and report on the arrival of ‘Homo sapiens sapiens’ (a mismatch in the volume with Homo neanderthalensis, i.e. subspecies versus species, is another minor inconsistency). Chapter 6 is marred by an awful reconstruction of middle Devensian (MIS 3) palaeodrainage, showing the Test as the main arm of the Solent River and paying little heed to what is known of pre-Holocene offshore fluvial courses. Chapter 7 borrows some of the Part 2 authors, underlining the effort taken to bridge the gap and giving it a more archaeological flavour than the rest of Part 1. Further linkage is seen in the first two chapters of Part 2: 8, ‘An introduction to the Holocene of the Thames’, and 9, ‘The Thames and its changing environment in our era’. Chapter 8 includes some interesting details of the history of research and on some of the personalities involved, although coming right up-to-date with brief reviews of evidence that can be obtained from systematic field walking, from aerial photography and from LIDAR.

Chapter 9 is where environmental information from the Holocene is summarized (in 20 pages), in terms of palaeohydrology and vegetational succession, from the late Devensian to the early Holocene through to the advent of farming. There is allusion to oxygen isotopes and ice cores and much discussion of pollen, although the only pollen diagram in Part 2 appears in Chapter 11, depicting the sequence at Daisy Banks Fen, Oxfordshire (cf. Parker, 1999) with its evidence of anthropogenic (farming) impact. There are several Pleistocene pollen diagrams (generally simplified versions) in Part 1. In the main, the rest of Part 2 is about the archaeology (fair enough, given the book title) with relatively little comment on palaeoenvironmental evidence, concentrating on monuments, artefacts and evidence from excavations. As with Part 1, it is copiously illustrated, with plentiful colour.

An impressive feature throughout the volume is double- or even triple-page illustrated spreads, belonging to the chapters and, indeed, numbered as figures within these but standing alone from them, devoted to what might be called ‘highlights’. Swanscombe (Figure 2.15) gets a quadruple, as does Figure 1.2: ‘Climate change and dating’. Arguably these could have been classified as boxes, since they contain montages of images and succinct linking text, in addition to captions for the individual images. They can be treated as separate ‘asides’, designed to attract attention to an important site or an important concept within the story being told. They are generally of excellent quality, making good use of what appears to be computer-generated imagery of, e.g., surprisingly spick-and-span-looking early hominins (Figure 1.25) and of woolly mammoths (Figure 6.7). An image of a proglacial lake in Alaska will surely serve to mislead, however, when included in Figure 2.3, on the (Anglian) diversion of the Thames, given the depiction of an intermontane water body; this is a poor analogue for the lake(s) in the Vale of St Albans that form an important part of that diversion story.

As a book purporting to provide an accessible synthesis, it can be supposed that the target audience for this handsome volume is the interested layperson, although it would surely be an asset in schools and university libraries, even if, in the latter case, it serves as a starting point for research on a topic, pointing to further literature sources. It is a volume that can be browsed as well as read in depth and might prove an inspiration to the browser or reader. It is a very nice book to have and, at the modest price of £40.00 (all bar a penny) it represents excellent value, so surely many will want to have it. As far as Quaternary scientists are concerned, however, it might attract Pleistocene specialists more than Holocene workers, unless the latter are archaeologists.