ABSTRACT
Industrialization is one of the key developments in the post-medieval British economy and society, and also one of the major contributions that Britain made to the rest of the world. Richard Newman’s The Historical Archaeology of Britain c. 1540–19006 attempts to bring disciplines of post-medieval and industrial archaeology together, despite a separate chapter on the latter, the subject matter of which would perhaps have been better integrated into earlier chapters on house and home, landscapes and so on. The concept of industrial heritage is one which is perhaps more familiar to industrial than post-medieval archaeologists, since the discipline of industrial archaeology grew out of an urgent need to protect survivals from the industrial past which were fast disappearing in 1950s and 1960s. David Cranstone feels we should not lose sight of the importance of technology in our determination to delineate the social dimensions of the industrial past: and that archaeology could throw light on the processes of innovation and invention.
