Time's Anvil: England, Archaeology and the Imagination by Richard Morris.

The ground beneath our feet is made up of layers upon layers of history, the accumulated evidence of human existence from the millennia of prehistory to the hours of yesterday. These pasts are vertiginous, ever-expanding and engulfing, and it is this dizzying panorama of the vast, tangled mass of what has gone before that Richard Morris sets out to map in Time's Anvil. For Morris, this book is an "expedition" into the past, and as such it is both expansive and singular. But Time's Anvil is also an impassioned history and defence of archaeology, a history of humanity in England, and a heartfelt meditation on transience and mortality.