Time Detectives: How Archaeologist Use Technology to Recapture the Past

by Brian Fagan

Overview

From Simon & Schuster, Time Detectives is Brian Fagan's exploration of how archeologists use technology to recapture the past.

University of California Professor of Anthropology Brian Fagan offers a fascinating look at how the key archaeological discoveries of the past 50 years were made-and how new techniques and devices have led to new insights into ancient civilizations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780684818283
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	03/15/1996
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Brian Murray Fagan is a prolific author of popular archaeology books and a professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Editorial 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. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.

Library Journal