Product Description

This entertaining Very Short Introduction reflects the enduring popularity of archaeology-a subject which appeals as a pastime, career, and academic discipline, encompasses the whole globe, and surveys 2.5 million years. From deserts to jungles, from deep caves to mountain tops, from pebble tools to satellite photographs, from excavation to abstract theory, archaeology interacts with nearly every other discipline in its attempts to reconstruct the past.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15754 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
Paul Bahn is a freelance writer, translator, and broadcaster in archaeology. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a contributing editor of Archaeology magazine (New York), vice-president of the Australian Rock Art Research Association, and vice-president (UK) of the Easter Island Foundation.

Customer Reviews

A must read for wannabe archeologists!
As part of the very short introduction series, reading this book was like a breath of fresh air. Witty and informative it outlines the main areas of this subject, and includes chapters on dating artefacts, how people lived and thought, settlement and society,and how minorities are dealt with within archeology. It should be on every archeologist's bookshelf!(oh, and the cartoons are wonderfully funny as well)

Dig this
In the Preface to this excellent little book, the author says his intention is to give the reader a taste of the subject and to help students decide if they want to study archaeology at University. It performs those tasks admirably. It quite rightly provides a very broad overview rather than going deeply into specific topics, but manages to cram in loads of interesting facts along the way. The tone is jocular, and sometimes the humour is rather forced ("Relative dating does not mean going out with your cousin") but for the most part it works, and Bill Tidy's cartoons are well up to standard.

Bahn is pretty harsh with some modern archaeological notions, and objectivity toward his peers is clearly not a priority with him, but I don't think this seriously distorts what he has to say.

I do not know of a better short introduction to the subject than this book. Following this, you might want to read Egyptology, another excellent entry in the same series.