This lively memoir tells the story of a boy growing up in Plymouth, Devon, getting excited about archaeology after visits to mainland Greece and Crete, trying to get into Greek archaeology and relocating northwards into the Balkans, where he spent a career in prehistoric research. The chapters alternate between museum/university experiences and the author's major research projects. The experiences of working in that part of the world as the Third Balkan War was starting were dramatic. The memoir presents stories with implications for East–West relationships which will soon disappear from living memory. The ways that research projects originated and developed are also strongly featured. There is also a fund of anecdotes about prehistorians living and dead. The publication of this memoir records those fragments of the discipline’s history which are in danger of being lost forever. But Chapman's life story is not erased from this account, which is not an anthropological work but, rather, a participant account with a modicum of relevant personal details. This memoir provides the insider story to the research results.

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of plates
• Image credits
• Preface
• 1. Growing up
• 2. Undergraduate days
• 3. Postgraduate days
• 4. Museum intermezzo
• 5. Newcastle upon Tyne
• 6. The Neothermal Dalmatia Project
• 7. The background to the Third Balkan War of 1991–1995
• 8. The Upper Tisza Project
• 9. The fragmentation breakthrough and other broken stories
• 10. Working in the European Association of Archaeologists
• 11. Life in Durham
• 12. Research in the Balkans in the 2000s
• 13. The Ukrainian Trypillia Megasites Project
• 14. Looking back – looking forward
• Further reading