The Prentice-Hall Concise Book of Archaeology

There is more to archaeology than striking a buried object with a spade. Today's archaeologist works as part of a scientific team that can include analysts of radioactive materials, botanists; astronomers, soil experts and code-breakers. Modern archaeology is not unlike highly-skilled o detective work: looking for evidence in the smallest clues and using it to reconstruct a picture of what really happened. THE PRENTICE-HALL CONCISE BOOK OF ARCHAEOLOGY explains in non-technical language everything that is involved in present-day archaeology, including sophisticated laboratory techniques. The author takes the reader step by step from the origins of modern scientific archaeology to the great discoveries about past civilizations in such places as Egypt, Crete, the Indus Valley, and Central and South America. Archaeology is about people. The author shows how much we can learn about what people believed (from how they buried their dead), or about the way they lived (from their rubbish dumps). She reconstructs children's toys and the games they played. She shows how we deduce the food people ate and their average life-spans (from organic remains) and how means of transport and different kinds of cattle give clues to the way prehistoric economies developed and changed. She shows, too, how the unwritten history of the past lasted until quite recent times, in lost medieval villages and their field systems, for example, and even in the industrial relics of less than 100 years ago. The illustrations will help you to share in the excitement of discovering forgotten cities and unsuspected works of art, while specially drawn diagrams and reconstructions enable you to visualize the methods archaeologists have developed for understanding the many silent messages from the past.…