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In the last decade archaeology has been
revolutionized and has in turn transformed our views of
our own origins and of the early history of mankind. There
have been dramatic new discoveries -- two-million-year-old
campsites of early man in Africa, evidence of agriculture
going back 10,000 years in Syria and New Guinea, traces
of early Mesopotamian civilization halfway to India, and
spectacular finds such as the third millennium archive of
Ebla or the tomb of Philip of Macedon. But more importantly,
archaeologists have rapidly and radically extended the whole
range of their enquiries: they have adapted powerful and
sophisticated techniques of analysis from the physical and
biological sciences; they have studied and applied relevant
work from other human and social sciences -- anthropology,
geography, demography, economic history; they have proposed
exciting new theories to reconstruct and explain the processes
of cultural change that have taken man from hunter to astronaut
in an instant of the evolutionary time scale.
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology
is the first comprehensive review of these advances. It
is encyclopedic both in time and in space, giving a global
account from the emergence of the human species to the expansion
of medieval Europe. It traces the whole development of modern
man through the revolutionary changes in language, culture
and technology that took place in the last Ice Age and the
succeeding developments of the postglacial period -- the
beginnings of agriculture, which established a new relationship
with the natural environment and which led to the great
increase in human populations and to new forms of social
organization in towns, states and empires, taking mankind
to the threshold of the modern world.
Each chapter is written by a specialist
in the region and period, and the volume has been prepared
within a unified framework with the advice of a distinguished
international board of editors.
The maps and illustrations, many in full
colour, set a high standard in visual presentation. They
have been specially prepared to convey as directly as possible
the primary evidence of archaeology and to interpret complex
information and ideas in an intelligible form. They are
supplemented with many other reference aids, including chronological
charts, global maps, and bibliographies.
Andrew Sherratt is Assistant Keeper in
the Ashmolean Museum and teaches archaeology in the University
of Oxford. He studied archaeology and anthropology at Peterhouse,
Cambridge, and has carried out research in southeast Europe
and Turkey. His main interests are in the reconstruction
of social and economic patterns in prehistory: he is currently
directing a field project in Hungary and developing a computer-based
system for mapping prehistoric sites. He is one of the editors
of the series New Directions in Archaeology, published
by Cambridge University Press.
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