Discovering Our Past: A Brief Introduction to Archaeology

This brief, inexpensive introduction to the techniques, methods, and theoretical frameworks of contemporary archaeology follows the same organizing principle as the text Archaeology: Discovering Our Past but features less detail. Archaeological methods and theory are covered comprehensively--at a reasonable level of detail--in under 300 pages. Illustrative examples and case studies present a temporal and geographic balance of both Old and New World sites. Abundant student aids include maps of archaeological areas, extensive illustrations, chapter introductions and summaries, a guide to further reading at the end of each chapter, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index.

Wendy Ashmore is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. Her research centers on settlement patterns, household archaeology, gender, and ancient space and place in southeastern Mesoamerica. Publications include Settlement Archaeology at Quiriguá, Guatemala (University of Pennsylvania Museum, 2007), and edited volumes on Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns (New Mexico, 1981), Household and Community in the Mesoamerican Past (with R. R. Wilk, New Mexico, 1988), Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Approaches (with A. B. Knapp, Blackwell, 1999), and Integrating the Diversity of 21st-Century Anthropology: The Life and Intellectual Legacies of Susan Kent (with M.-A. Dobres, S. M. Nelson, and A. Rosen, American Anthropological Association, 2006), together with numerous articles and book chapters on these and related topics.

Robert J. Sharer is Shoemaker Professor in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Curator of the American Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. He has published over 100 scholarly articles, and several monographs reporting the results of his archaeological research, including a three-volume Chalchuapa report (1978), and a one-volume Verapaz report (1987). He is general editor of the Quirigua Reports, with four volumes published (1979, 1983, 1993, and 2007), and general editor of the forthcoming Early Classic Copan Acropolis Reports. He has co-edited five books, including Regional Perspectives on the Olmec (1989) and Understanding Early Classic Copán (2004), and is the author of Quirigua: A Classic Maya Center and Its Sculpture (1990), Everyday Life in Maya Civilization (1996), and three editions of The Ancient Maya, the most recent a completely revised work in collaboration with Loa P. Traxler.