Edited by Marcus Brittain, Sam Lucy & Marie Louise Stig Sørensen

Developer-led archaeology has reshaped how we uncover the past, expanding rapidly alongside the transformation of modern landscapes. This volume celebrates the career of Christopher Evans, one of the field’s most influential figures, co‑founder and long‑time director of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, via which he has conducted groundbreaking fieldwork and internationally recognised research. Contributions are gathered from colleagues and collaborators whose work reflects Evans’s profound impact on landscape archaeology, prehistoric and Roman studies, and the evolving practice of archaeological interpretation. From the Fenland to Australasia, and from urban Cambridge to Cape Verde, the chapters explore the global reach of Evans’s ideas – where bold experimentation, deep contextual thinking, and an eye for how the discipline’s shifting histories open new possibilities for understanding the past. Blending analysis and artistry, personal reflection and scholarly insight, this volume is both a tribute to Evans’s remarkable career and a testament to the vibrant communities of practice that drive and enrich the archaeological project.

• Complete volume - The archaeological project: Reflections on practice, interpretation and historiography
• Introductions
• Chapter 1 - By the book. The field manual in British archaeology
• Chapter 2 - What’s in a name? A brief history of British Neolithic pottery nomenclature and some reflections on its legacy
• Chapter 3 - Ephemeral presences and missing dimensions: scatters and scales
• Chapter 4 - Decolonizing archaeology?
• Chapter 5 - Militant mundanity. When ethnologists and historians challenge archaeological practice
• Chapter 6 - Learning from the past: why archaeology is relevant to the modern world
• Chapter 7 - A consideration of the military and cosmological significance of the enclosures of Arbury Camp and Wandlebury Hillfort
• Chapter 8 - Beyond provisional models: domestic space in prehistoric roundhouses
• Chapter 9 - Redrawing stone and timber circles: culture, nature and field archaeology
• Chapter 10 - Barrow digging at Over/Needingworth Quarry – The Evans Method
• Chapter 11 - Digging in documentation: new discoveries in old excavation data of Beaker burials at Oostwoud-Tuithoorn
• Chapter 12 - Exceptionalism or evidential accident? The peculiarities of Neolithic and Bronze Age northeast East Anglia
• Chapter 13 - ‘Islands’ in the Fen: ‘the surface available for settlement’ and the implication of a wetlands ‘Pompeii’
• Chapter 14 - Changing interpretations of the riverine landscape of the lower Great Ouse valley
• Chapter 15 - Keeping count: the patterning of Scored Ware in Cambridgeshire
• Chapter 16 - Don’t let sleeping dogs lie – reconsidering the Clay Farm patera
• Chapter 17 - Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in Cambridge: nineteenth-century excavators and excavations at Girton, St John’s and Newnham
• Chapter 18 - Pennies from Langtoft: a twentieth-century watery coin hoard in rural Lincolnshire
• Chapter 19 - Gerard Groot S.V.D., the shell mounds of Ubayama, and the Archaeological Institute of Japan: unsung heroes in the history of Japanese archaeology
• Chapter 20 - Some general propositions concerning global prehistory and two brief examples
• Chapter 21 - At the transition from antiquarianism to archaeology – two Nordic examples
• Chapter 22 - Chris and the foreign – our Cape Verdean adventure
• Chapter 23 - Archaeological theory and the history of Australian archaeology
• Chapter 24 - The potential for archaeology in Antarctic science – seen through archives of the first excavations of nineteenth-century sealers’ refuges
• Chapter 25 - Archaeology is too important a subject not to be fun