Footmarks: A Journey into Our Restless Past

Leary (The Remembered Land), an archaeologist at the University of York, embarks on an engrossing tour of the ways in which “people have moved over millions of years.” Examining what archaeological evidence reveals about “how our forebears lived” and traveled, he explains that isotope analyses of prehistoric skeletons suggest that ancient farmers likely moved around more than hunter-gatherers because they frequently exhausted resources near their settlements and were forced to relocate. The narrative is deliberately “loose” and full of detours, moving in the span of several pages from the medieval provenance of English ridgeways to the preservation of Neolithic timber trackways in Somerset peatlands to recreations of the last moments of several fourth-century BCE bodies (likely sacrifices) recovered from a Danish bog. Elsewhere, Leary explores the remnants of Bronze Age bridges on the Thames River in London and Buckinghamshire, how preserved human and animal footprints reveal evidence of ancient hunts, and how the construction of a replica of Jesus’s house in Walsingham, England turned the parish into a pilgrimage site. The meandering narrative can sometimes feel unfocused, but there’s plenty of fascinating historical tidbits along the way (for example, DNA analysis and archaeological findings indicate that a massive wave of immigration from the Eurasian steppe introduced metallurgy to Britain around 2500 BCE). This is a trip worth taking. (Aug.)