In archeology, what is beautiful, interesting, useful, or otherwise worthwhile, is what is true. Or if not true, then at least verifiable in principle. A speculation, clearly labelled as such, may be beautiful and useful. But a fantasy smuggled into an argument, anything based on a wilful distortion of evidence, anything crackpot, anything with an uncandid political or religious agenda - nothing so contaminated is beautiful, or useful, or indeed interesting.

It is right that archeology should be so popular, since it appeals so powerfully to the imagination. But it is all about evidence, and something to admire in this wide-ranging study of the earliest history of Europe is the trade-off between evidence and the imagination.

Barry Cunliffe offers a survey of European development from the Last Glacial Maximum (10,000 BC) to the beginning of modern history. A sober assessor of evidence, he is also happy to speculate, as when he discusses the strange fact that certain elements of early jewellery, perforated amber spaces for multistrand necklaces, are found only in Wessex and Mycenae. Was this, he asks, “the result of a single journey - carried perhaps on a Mycenaean boat that had ventured into the Atlantic, or by an enterprising Wessex warrior exploring the wider world? Or could the carrier have been a Wessex woman wearing her finery as she left home as a gift to a Mycenaean prince?” (This Wessex woman sounds like a subject for a Thomas Hardy poem.)

Cunliffe is a fan of Herodotus, whose record of the funeral customs of the Scythians turns out to accord well with the surviving evidence. This involves the strangling of “one concubine, a cook, a groom, an attendant and a messenger” to bury with the deceased king, plus, on the first anniversary of the death, 50 strangled attendants (true-born Scythians, for they keep no slaves), attached by vertical stakes to 50 of the finest strangled horses. The dead king is stuffed with frankincense, parsley and anise. The attendant youths and horses are stuffed with chaff.

For most of the enormous period covered in this account, there are no known individuals to talk about and no historians to record their deeds. There are movements of peoples and the burial customs of their elites. There are enormous shell middens on which successive generations have lived and in which they have buried their dead, rather as if living on a pile of their own detritus were a way of asserting the security and continuity of their way of life. There is negative evidence, in the form of post-holes or impressions left in the mud, but some basic features of the societies in question leave hardly any evidence at all.

Slavery, for instance, leaves little trace over the millenniums. The wine trade, on the other hand, is well attested, and we learn from wrecks of the first century BC that wine occupied more than 75% of the cargo space when Rome was trading among the Gauls. And this chimes with what we are told by the historian Diodorus Siculus, that “many Italian merchants, with their usual love of cash, look on the Gallic craving for wine as their treasure. They transport the wine by boat on the navigable rivers and by wagon through the plains and receive in return for it an incredibly high price, for one amphora of wine they get in return a slave - a servant in exchange for a drink”.

Transportation by river and cabotage (that is, navigation of coastal waters) features prominently. We learn about the currents and winds of the Mediterranean, and about the river routes through central Europe that proved important over the millenniums for trade, innovation, migration and conquest and that eventually led to the establishment of a trade route from Sweden to China. The Scandinavians on the Volga were described in AD922 by a Muslim geographer: “I have never seen more perfect specimens, tall as date-palms, blond and ruddy; they wear neither tunics nor caftans, but the men wear a garment that covers one side of the body, and leaves a hand free. Each man has an axe, a sword and a knife, and keeps each by him at all times.”

In Byzantium, the Varangian guard (the “emperor's drunken soldiery” of Yeats's poem) were Scandinavian mercenaries who, Cunliffe tells us, “were recognised for their drunkenness and the massive battle axes that they wielded, in lethal combination. It may have been one of their number who scratched his name, Halfdan, in runic script on a marble balustrade in the church of Hagia Sophia”.

When history is written in this way, conventional priorities are overthrown. Geographically, Europe is seen as nothing more than an excrescence of Asia. The Roman empire is viewed as an interlude, albeit an interlude of four and a half centuries, and the great names of Roman history get short shrift: “The century of political turmoil and military conflict that engulfed Italy and spread to its provinces in the period from 133 to 27BC is usually explained in terms of the ‘big men' who inspired the factions and led the armies - people such as the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Augustus - but really they were only helpless human beings caught up on the deep swell of change set in motion by the rise of acquisitive elites vying for space in a peninsula too small to contain them.”

There is a great deal about rivers, about boats and chariots, and about land routes in general. The Romans perfect their empire-wide road system under Hadrian, rather late in this story. The first appearance of pottery is noted as holding “a deep fascination as it represents the first attempt by a European community to create an entirely new material using fire”. On the other hand, the invention of coinage is of less interest to the argument of the book.There are many maps, one showing the distribution of cauldrons, flesh hooks (for taking meat out of the pot) and spits, others showing finds such as ornamented tweezers, bronze buckets and axes (Swedish axes for the Volga trade). The photographs are to the point.

The book is pitched beyond the immediate circle of the specialist reader and the chapter notes come in the form of detailed suggestions for further reading rather than academic footnotes as such. It is an admirable distillation of an enormous amount of evidence - full of what is beautiful, interesting and (it would seem) true.

Europe Between the Oceans by Barry Cunliffe
Yale £30 pp480 Buy the book from Books First £27.00 including free delivery

Times Recommends

• Extract: My Little Armalite
• Madonna: A life in 10 songs
• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads