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Professor Gordon Childe's pioneer achievements earned him general
recognition as the most eminent and influential scholar of prehistory in our time.
In the words of his biographer, Man Makes Himself -- his most popular book
-- 'did more than any other work to popularise the study of prehistory everywhere.'
The book is a lucid study of the origin and progress of man from earliest recorded
history to modern times, and an absorbing description of his ever-increasing control
of the environment. The author describes the crucial
discoveries and applications of science that made this control possible -- artificial
irrigation, the plough, animal-power, sailing-boats, wheeled vehicles, fermentation,
the use of copper and bricks, a solar calendar, the alphabet, numeral notation,
bronze and iron -- but he is also concerned with the simultaneous growth of science
and superstition, and the way in which man developed traditions that helped to
change himself as well as the world he inhabits. This
first illustrated edition has been prepared by Sally Green, who studied archaeology
at the University of Sheffield and was later awarded an M.A. for a thesis on the
work of Gordon Childe. She has contributed an Introduction that sets the book
in the context of current archaeological research, and has added illustrations
that give an extra visual dimension to a text described in the journal Antiquity
as 'the most stimulating, original and convincing contribution to the history
of civilisation we have ever read.' |
