Aerial Atlas of Ancient Britain

Product Information

Second World War anti-invasion measures such as anti-aircraft obstructions (ditches and earthworks) at Hampton Court Palace in 1941, and images from the same year of RAF Kenley showing camouflaged runways. Yet really grasping the scale and beauty of the stone remnants and carved patterns that remain is often challenging at ground level.

The remaining 100,000 images come from the Historic England Archive aerial photography collection, which numbers over six million images in total, and includes important historic photography, including interwar and post-war images from Aerofilms Ltd and The Royal Air Force. Many of Abram’s images have an abstract quality that momentarily disrupts one’s sense of perspective, allowing the shapes carved thousands of years ago to evoke an emotional resonance―an experience at once pleasurable and instructive. Firstly, there are no site plans or maps apart from the endpaper, which for an “atlas” is both mystifying but also highly irritating, as it joins all the other contemporary archaeology books that are either too embarrassed to embrace their own subject for fear of putting off the “casual” reader, or are simply too lazy to include them. Aerial imagery provides a fascinating insight into the development and expansion of the nation’s urban centres and changes to the rural landscape.

Evocative sites include The Broch of Gurness on Orkney, Kilmartin Glen in Argyll, Happisburgh in Norfolk, Pen y Crug in Powys, Castle Dore in Fowey, and many more rich and varied sites. It will also provide industry professionals and local authorities with a useful resource to help planning, heritage projects and archaeological investigation. The eye-in-the-sky perspective unveils both the unseen forms of these ancestral monuments as well as their relationship to their wider landscapes, capturing subtle symmetries and forgotten sight lines. This breathtaking collection of aerial images reveals ancient monuments from all around the British Isles, as they have never been seen before: Neolithic enclosures, cairns and stone circles; Bronze Age villages, farmsteads, tombs and burial mounds; and Iron Age hillforts, all photographed in spectacular bird's-eye-view detail.

Established in 1967, the team takes photographs of England from the air to discover new archaeological sites, create archaeological maps and monitor the condition of historic sites across the country. In these turbulent times, we’re committed to telling expansive stories from across the globe, highlighting the everyday lives of normal but extraordinary people.Stonehenge is only a few miles away, as are the Iron Age hill forts of White Sheet Hill and Winklebury Camp. Then, once you’ve worked out how to fly it, don’t just randomly go around taking the same pictures as everyone else. Perhaps the best example is the Aerial Atlas of Ancient Crete, also published by Thames and Hudson many years ago.

Wartime adaptations to sites, for example, images of Greenwich Park in 1946 show it covered in a patchwork of allotments to grow food and aid the war effort.A spectacular and mesmerizing collection of aerial photographs of Britain’s most extraordinary prehistoric sites. Food, personalised items and self-assembly furniture (once partly or wholly assembled) cannot be refunded or exchanged unless faulty. This breathtaking collection of aerial images reveals ancient monuments from all around the British Isles, as they have never been seen before: Neolithic enclosures, cairns and stone circles; Bronze Age villages, farmsteads, tombs and burial mounds; and Iron Age hillforts, all photographed in spectacular bird’s-eye-view detail.

variant_no_of_reviews":"0","variant_pf_id":"28326","variant_urlkeyphrase":"all-books/et-tu-brute","voption1":"","voption2":"","voption3":""}} Et Tu Brute? On the ground, it is sometimes difficult to place the archaeology in its geographical setting, and this does it so well.It can also reveal striking discoveries - such as ‘cropmarks’ showing hidden, archaeology beneath the surface.