Warwick RodwellCritiques

Far too dry for the layman, and probably too dry for the professional, but you can't fault their thoroughness.

Well, not quite; it's the archaeology of Christian churches in Great Britain. With that, it's still an interesting book, well organized, with great photographs and line drawings (the aerial view of a fully excavated church with all the subfloor graves and their occupants appealed to my ghoulish tastes).

However, it contains one astonishing sentence: (p127)

"There is no doubt that dowsing works - it is used daily by farmers, water engineers, and others, to discover the whereabouts of buried pipes and drains - but its scientific basis remains largely unexplained."

The author then goes on to explain that although "most archaeologists dismiss dowsing", "some elements of dowsed plans have been subsequently validated by excavation..."

I find it astonishing that an eminent archaeologist (he's a professor at the University of Reading and Consultant Archaeologist to Westminster Abbey, Bristol, Lichfield and Wells cathedrals) does not understand that just because something is "used daily" doesn't mean that it "works". To be fair, there's only one paragraph in the book mentioning dowsing (or any other pseudoscience); I guess I can forgive Mr. Rodwell a single eccentricity. So the book is recommended with a caution.