Rescue archaeology takes different forms, including excavating sites threatened with destruction and teasing publications out from archives and finds long abandoned as unpublishable. The excavations at Mucking fall into the former category; this volume into the latter. Mucking was an epic excavation of an enormous cluster of archaeological features on a terrace above the Thames in Essex, at the point at which the river widens into an estuary. Directed by Margaret Jones, with help from her husband Tom, between 1965 and 1978, and funded scantly by the Ministry of Works, the site had evidence from the Mesolithic to the post-medieval period, with its main occupation between the late Bronze Age and the early Anglo-Saxon period (c. 900 BC to AD 800). This was rescue archaeology in advance of quarrying, where the diggers often had little time to excavate and record before the draglines destroyed everything. Following the Second World War, development in the UK took off: suburban areas expanded, roads were built and sand, gravel and stone were quarried at an increasing rate. Archaeological regulation was not in place to ensure the proper excavation and analysis of the mass of evidence under threat prior to a change of legislation in 1990 (so-called PPG-16), which required developers to pay for the investigation of the archaeological sites they threatened—planning guidance that is being weakened by current legislation.

Mucking was exemplary of contemporary archaeology, but on a giant scale. It was discovered through an aerial photograph of Kenneth St Joseph in 1961 that highlighted the double rings (thought to be a Neolithic henge) overlain by rectangular enclosures and a mass of other features, which also included the encroachment of gravel-working on the site. The excavations were open area, following stripping of the topsoil (and possibly some of the archaeological features) by machine, and they eventually covered 18ha: the largest excavation at the time in Britain. As Evans et al. note, the number of features excavated was prodigious:

The excavation also suffered from a particular reputation—even by the spartan digging conditions of the time, Mucking was seen to be tough. I never dug there, but in the 1970s heard tales of extreme cold, bad food and eccentricity. As time elapsed after the excavation, another reputation developed—this was a site with a byzantine archive, a huge mountain of finds and a difficult, rather old-fashioned director, all of which militated against proper publication. In fact, this last aspect was not true, as publications did come out, although not by Margaret Jones herself (Clark Reference Clark1993; Hamerow Reference Hamerow1993; Hirst & Clark Reference Hirst and Clark2009). The volume reviewed here covers the prehistoric features and finds (but with some discussion of later elements); a second volume, on the Roman aspects of Mucking, has subsequently appeared (Lucy & Evans Reference Lucy and Evans2016) and will be the subject of separate review.

This present volume has a dual purpose. Its main aim is to present and make sense of the prehistoric archaeology, but it also provides a historiography of Mucking together with an analysis of what was, and what was not, done during excavation and analysis. The 1960s and 1970s developed new modes of open-area excavation, on the gravels of the major rivers for instance, demonstrating a mass of settlement that counter-balanced the previous emphasis on the uplands, principally the Wessex chalk. Such techniques were also used on complex urban stratigraphy in Winchester, London and elsewhere. As this volume explores, large excavations often outstripped the ability to deal with plans, sections and finds when it came to post-excavation, and here too Mucking is paradigmatic. The advent of desktop computers, database packages and GIS means that today we can handle the spatial, temporal and finds information from sites such as Mucking. There have also been important procedural advances in post-excavation—we now appreciate the sequence that analysis can take and how to generate a narrative (although this may become too routine). The Mucking work also aimed at a completeness of recovery, analysis and archiving, which slowed progress. The picture emerges here of a formidable and determined site director (whose reputation was tinged by a degree of misogyny), determined to rescue a site at considerable personal cost and discomfort, but who was ill-equipped to make sense of her findings once digging stopped. (As an aside on personalities, it is interesting how little emerges about her husband—“Tom was simply furtive” (p. 113), two ex-diggers note.) Evans et al. recognise the benefits of higher rates of recovery in the field compared with today's customary low sampling percentages, but also wonder why more sampling was not countenanced in the finds’ analysis, or more expedient ways adopted for archiving.

This volume and its Roman-period companion ruin Mucking's reputation as an unpublishable site. It is a remarkable achievement, making available a broad and fascinating site narrative, some of which has never been glimpsed before. The structure of the book follows the site chronology, so that after an introduction to Mucking, its archive and the current work in Chapter 1, we are taken through the Mesolithic to middle Bronze Age field system in Chapter 2, the late Bronze Age ringworks of the South Rings in Chapter 3, the earlier and later Iron Age in Chapters 4 and 5, with a summing up of the results including the Roman to post-medieval periods in Chapter 6 (with an excellent piece by Tim Champion situating Mucking in the prehistories and early histories of Essex and Kent).

This is an amazing volume and a great credit to Evans and the Cambridge Archaeological Unit. As such, any criticism seems carping. I would, however, have liked a clearer and more comprehensive account of the methods adopted in tackling the archive and the finds—there are three sections on project framing which help us to understand what was done, but it is hard to be certain about the methods used. A clearer statement of methodology would have allowed for greater evaluation of the results and provided a model for what can be done on other similar sites. It seems, however, that the watchword was expedience—they did not worry about the mass of features of uncertain date or type, nor did they attempt mass analysis of finds; Matt Brudenell did undertake a reassessment of some of the late prehistoric pottery from drawings and plotted distributions, but generally, reports from older analyses have been used. The acidic soils at Mucking explain the relative lack of human and animal bones, but finds of other types are abundant.

In the final chapter, Evans wrestles with important issues of what the archaeology represents, comparing artefact densities with other sites nearby and in the Fens to gain a sense of the high relative density of occupation at Mucking, especially from the late Iron Age to early medieval periods. The middle Bronze Age saw the establishment of a field system, but little in the way of habitation (as is often the case), raising questions of what and where the community lived. The South Rings complex was formed of concentric ditches (and possibly banks), with a structure in the middle (a house or a barrow) and much evidence of metal working, salt making and textile manufacture. This concentrated evidence was followed in the earlier Iron Age by more dispersed occupation in round houses, and for the first time, the nature of the community becomes clearer. One of the great outcomes of the re-analysis has resulted in a new understanding of the late Iron Age evidence, located around a central area that the team has named ‘The Plaza’. This was a relatively empty area bounded by lines of posts, two rows of square barrows (the northern set associated with cremations) and a row of granaries (some of monumental size) that may have followed a road. Not all of these elements fit together perfectly, suggesting some evolution over time, but they also form the broad ground plan for the early Roman enclosures, one of the most obvious sets of continuities on the site.

This brief description gives only a hint of the richness of the site and of the new findings presented in Lives in land, which themselves could be expanded upon and nuanced by further analysis. The work of the Joneses at Mucking might be seen as a failure, but this volume makes abundantly clear how much good work was done in difficult conditions and the importance of the material today. We can also be grateful to Evans and his team for so much recuperative effort to produce a volume that can be read and reread.