1. Flint Knapping: A Guide to Making Your Own Stone Age Tool Kit, by Robert Turner. Because I really want to learn to make some stone tools, and that seems like a fairly good undertaking on a desert island!
2. Some random tall but skinny foldout book on Ancient Egypt that I can’t find on Amazon or anywhere else…it was from ca. 1990 and produced by a museum (the Met if I remember correctly). But it was my first book on anything archaeological and it has stuck in my memory!
3. Archaeology: The Basics by Clive Gamble. In 2008, after a few years of fighting an injury, I decided to give up my career as a professional violinist and become an archaeologist. A few weeks after making this painful and pretty random decision, I was in a bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to my undergraduate university, where I majored in violin but took one course in archaeology. I bought this book 8 years after graduating from UMich, and was totally overwhelmed that I barely understood a word of a ‘basics’ book on archaeology. I keep it proudly on my shelf now as a reminder of how far I’ve come in 6 years.
4. Projectile Technology, edited by Heidi Knecht. Getting serious now, this book has some key chapters on projectile stuff from the 1990’s. I bought it recently and refer to it often for my PhD research. It’s a great read (for me) and hey, I might even learn something about hunting or fishing on my desert island! Anyway, it’s very helpful to my PhD thesis.
5. Archaeological Theory: An Introduction by Matthew Johnson. This book is fun, funny, and was an entertaining intro to theory. Honestly, it still makes me laugh.
6. The Prehistory of Music: Human Evolution, Archaeology, and the Origins of Musicality by Iain Morley. I haven’t gotten to read this yet because it’s on backorder at UCL’s library, but it looks so beautiful. I met Iain at Cambridge when I was first thinking about applying to study archaeology. I had a particular interest in the evolution of music given my background. I contacted him because I had found his thesis online and worked my way through it, learning to read the jargon of archaeological writing during a gray summer in Brussels. Iain was so kind to me, at a time that I must have appeared ignorant and naive: he showed me around Cambridge, introduced me to people, and was overall a great guy. His book is a culmination of many years of work and I can’t wait to read it.
7. Lithics, by William Andrefsky Jr. I just like looking at this book and dreaming of all the things I might know one day.
8. Reading German by Waltroud Coles and Bill Dodd. Because if I’m stuck on a desert island I may as well learn something that’s actually useful for my research!
Annemieke Milks is a first year PhD student at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology. She’s researching the earliest known weapons, and has an interest in the evolutionary origins of music too.
