Its History and Development

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Brief History

Heritage Marketing and Publications Ltd (formerly Heritage Archaeological Books) started trading in 1998.

The founder and Managing Director of Heritage Marketing and Publication, Michael de Bootman, has a long association with archaeology. In 1978, at the age of 10, he found an extensive Roman pottery kiln site on his father’s farm in West Norfolk. Under the mentorship of the late Tony Gregory his interest flourished – he has worked on a number of his own Roman sites in West Norfolk and has published the results of much of this work, notably the villa at Gayton Thorpe. He also participated in the well-known excavations at Stonea (Cambridgeshire) and Raunds (Northamptonshire).

Archaeology remained just a passionately pursued past-time and in the mid 1980s his chosen career took him into the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. Unfortunately this came to a sudden end following a serious knee injury and he then went to work for the Ford Motor Company in Essex as a Warranty Specialist. However, the appeal of archaeology was too great and in 1998 he set up the fore-runner of Heritage Marketing and Publications.

Michael first developed the business to enable the on-line and catalogue selling of offprints from national and county archaeological journals and it rapidly evolved to include secondhand/out-of-print archaeology and history titles. The business now includes the selling of reduced, new (remainder) titles as well as selected new publications. As a result, its on-line database has now grown to over 100,000 different titles, most offered for sale with discounts between 5% and 20%, and is still growing.

In 2003 a couple of sporadic ventures into publishing and distribution were consolidated into, what is now, a fast growing part of the business.

The business connects archaeologists and historians with the articles, books and journals they need for their enjoyment, studies and research and to put some finance into the recording and research of the archaeology of West Norfolk. To this end we has funded a number of field and research projects (liaising with Norfolk County Archaeologists). Principally we fund the Nar Valley Research Project that includes physical and geophysical surveys of multi-period landscapes, fieldwalking of specific Iron Age, Roman and Saxon sites and the evaluation excavation of a number of small sites within the study area. To learn more about these projects, please click here.