It was first published in 1994 by the Oxford-based company Blackwell as a part of their ‘Social Archaeology’ series, edited by the archaeologist Ian Hodder of the University of Cambridge.

An adherent of the post-processual school of thought in archaeological theory, in Fragments from Antiquity, Barrett eschews the 'grand narrative' approach which he associates with processualism, instead focusing in on the much smaller period of time between 2900 and 1200 BCE.

Barrett had contributed a section on Early Bronze Age hoards and metalwork to the 1985 book Symbols of Power: At the Time of Stonehenge, a work written by D.V.

We produce more generalized histories, not of 'people' but of 'processes', which place this or any other life in a larger context of economic and settlement systems, or in the mechanisms of social evolution.

He therefore accepts the role that post-processual theory plays in the book, but argues that "this is not a book about archaeological theory", instead being "an empirical study aimed at building a history of the period between about 2900 and 1200 BC in southern Britain" a timespan that he considers to be "one of the most remarkable periods in European prehistory".