|
Lost or abandoned cities, suddenly reclaimed
for the modern world, are one of the most exciting aspects
of archaeology. These cities provide a tangible link with
our ancestors, illuminating how and where they chose to
live. Some cities, like Pompeii, were literally stopped
dead, and we see a frozen moment of everyday life in the
first century. Others, like Troy, were gradually abandoned
and left to the elements, and traces of the various settlements
of different periods can all be found. Some cities were
laid to waste by famine, others by war or the plague. All,
however, bring lost and forgotten peoples back to life in
startlingly vivid ways.
In this volume a team of experts have presented
a wide variety of towns and cities across the globe, of
different types and from different periods, showing the
enormous range of the archaeological record -- and humanity's.
There are the classic lost cities: Pompeii, Troy, Machu
Pichu; but also the less well known -- Tanis, Chan-Chan
and Biskupin. Towns from Africa, the Far East, Australia
and the New World are all here, as well as the extraordinary
cities of the Classical world and the Middle East.
Emphasis has traditionally been placed on
the material remains of a society's elite -- the palaces,
tombs, temples, pyramids and other monumental structures
and art that were solidly built, often on a massive scale,
and which have therefore always been prominent features
of the landscape. However, often more interesting is to
investigate the houses and workshops of the craftworkers
and other working classes. One can see the uses to which
different quarters of a city were devoted, and how the system
functioned as a whole.
Selected from every corner of the earth,
the fifty great archaeological discoveries beautifully illustrated
and explored in this fascinating book demonstrate the enormous
range of human life on our planet.
Dr. Paul G. Bahn is a freelance writer,
translator and broadcaster in archaeology. He obtained a
doctorate in archaeology at Cambridge in 1979, specializing
in the prehistory of the Pyrenees. He has lectured in China,
the USA, Australia and Japan, as well as in western Europe,
and has published over 300 papers and articles in journals
on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the author of Journey
through the Ice Age, the standard introduction to cave
art; the co-author, with Colin Renfrew, of Archaeology:
Theories, Methods and Practice; and the editor of The
Collins Dictionary of Archaeology and The Cambridge
Illustrated History of Archaeology. In this series he
has edited The Story of Archaeology and Tombs,
Graves and Mummies.
|
