The Shrine of St Peter and the Vatican Excavations

The Shrine of St Peter and the Vatican Excavations, by Jocelyn Toynbee and John Ward-Perkins, published by Longmans in 1956, is the standard scholarly account of the archaeological excavations conducted beneath St Peter's Basilica between 1940 and 1949, which uncovered the necropolis and the aedicula marking the traditional site of Peter's grave. Its strength is that both authors were established classical archaeologists reporting directly on excavation they examined, making the book a primary scholarly record of the dig's findings. Its limit is that it reports the archaeology as understood at mid-century, so any claim resting on later debate over the bones found at the site should be checked against more recent scholarship as well.