Charting a decade of intensive fieldwork along a 2km stretch of the Colne Fen, Earith fen-edge, the scope of these books is formidable and together they include the work of 65 contributing specialists (with a forward by Ian Hodder). The fieldwork involved innovative methodologies, and groundbreaking scientific and micro-sampling studies are presented within the volumes. Portions of text are, moreover, avowedly experimental (e.g. intertextuality and antiquarian-informed perspectives) and it explores the long-term interplay of landscape process and (proto-) historicism. Appropriate to the practice of a comparative archaeology and the ‘challenge of numbers’, throughout emphasis is given to multiple-scale settlement and spatial/distributional analyses.

Concerned with the landscape’s prehistory, Volume I, apart from relating the project’s palaeoenvironmental researches, outlines the excavation of two ring-ditch monuments (with accompanying cremation cemeteries), major Middle Bronze Age fieldsystems and their accompanying occupation clusters, and seven Iron Age settlements.