Isn’t the Aventis Prize Wonderful?

The Aventis Prize celebrates the best in science publishing. I’ve only recently seen the short-list and it looks like my card and I will be off to Amazon again. The long-list is interesting too. I’ve read Gribben’s Deep Simplicity, and life would be much more wonderful if several pseudo-mathematical archaeologists had too. I also see Brian Fagan has a new one out. I suppose with him being so prolific that was always going to be a safe bet, and he’s a consistently good communicator so that’s another book to add to the ‘to-read pile. Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball looks essential too as it tackles collective decision making, which has implications for ‘agency‘ in archaeology.

A couple of years ago I would have followed this up with a whine about how it’s a shame that archaeologists cannot communicate, but that’s thankfully totally inaccurate now. I have Steve Mithen’s After the Ice and that Cave of the Mind one by someone whose name I forget on my to read pile. As for other books, while I don’t agree with all of Francis Pryor’s Britain BC, it is nonetheless an excellent bit of work. Martin Jones’s Molecule Hunt is also fantastic.