Time Detectives: How Archaeologists Use Technology to Recapture the Past - Hardcover

Fagan, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671793853 ISBN 13: 9780671793852

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1995

Synopsis

Revealing the work of modern archaeologists, who use technology and scientific methods more than shovels, this survey of recent findings includes the earliest Bronze Age shipwreck, ancient Incan farming systems that are superior to current methods, and a newly discovered Mayan city. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Brian Fagan is currently professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Reviews

This exhilarating mix of high adventure and serious scholarship explores how modern archeologists are using techniques like computer imaging, infrared photography and pollen analysis to reconstruct ancient cultures. Fagan (The Rape of the Nile), an archaeologist, describes Tiwanaku, a vanished city on Lake Titicaca's Bolivian shore (A.D. 5th-11th centuries), where Andean farmers used crop cultivation methods that are now being copied by modern villagers to increase yields. He visits enigmatic Flag Fen in eastern England, where an enormous Bronze Age timber platform rose amid uninhabited wetlands, the site of sacrificial offerings. He combs Wadi Kubbaniya, an obscure Egyptian valley, home to hunter-gatherers 10,000 years before the pharaohs-possible ancestors of ancient Egyptian civilization. He explains how excavations of the mansions and gardens of 18th-century colonial Annapolis, Md., are revealing class divisions between a white elite and African Americans who comprised as much as one-third of the population. Fagan also explores multistory New Mexican pueblos of the Anasazi, a Sumerian temple complex, Blackfoot bison hunt sites on Canadian cliffs and remnants of the Natufian culture-some of the world's earliest farmers-discovered in the 1930s in what is now Israel. Illustrated.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In his latest book since Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: The Americas Before Columbus (LJ 8/91), the author applauds post-World War II developments that have made archaeology a "high-technology science." He describes work done at a wide range of sites, from Stone Age Wadi Kubbaniya in southern Egypt to Colonial Annapolis, Maryland, and gives modern archaeologists the recognition they deserve for their interdisciplinary approach and meticulous methods of retrieving information. Unfortunately, Fagan diminishes 19th-century archaeology to a backdrop and makes it the object of negative comparisons. He refers to archaeologists of that period as "treasure hunters" and omits mention of the 19-century founder of scientific fieldwork, Sir William Flinders Petrie. To supplement his presentation, readers are advised to read C.W. Cerams's classic Gods, Graves, and Scholars (1967) before reading this book. For popular archaeology collections.
Joan Gartland, Detroit P.L.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Recounting the story of a dozen-plus sites around the world, Fagan avers that expert specialties have superseded the romance and mysterious wonder that used to animate the archaeologist's work--and inspired the classic book in this field, C. W. Ceram's Gods, Graves, and Scholars (Knopf, rev. ed. 1967). After acknowledging his debt to Ceram, Fagan ventures to places as varied as Hadrian's Wall, a bison kill site called Head-Smashed-In (Alberta), habitations along the Nile and Euphrates Rivers, and, thence, to Annapolis, Maryland. The commonality with digs in these diverse environments is the involvement of teams of experts using sophisticated dating and interpretive techniques--a far cry from the days of the soil sifter and pick ax swung by the solitary adventurer. The revolution began with carbon 14 dating of organic materials, which has continued with carbon-isotopic analysis that indicates from their bones what people ate. (At one dig site exploring the Anasazi culture of the Southwest, it was each other.) In each case, Fagan ably works the theme of the revelatory capability of high-tech methods, and how they (and logic) can assemble the picture of a society from its rubbish or building foundations. An engaging book sure to impell library patrons far into the particular sites Fagan describes--if not on out to the dig sites themselves. Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0671793853
• ISBN 13: 9780671793852
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288