The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology

New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.; Cambridge University Press, 1980. Cloth, 495 pages, illustrations; 27 cm. Firm binding, clean inside copy. Age toning, edges lightly soiled. Dust jacket protected in a mylar book cover. OVERSIZE! No priority/international, except by special arrangement. Profusely illustrated. "This is the first comprehensive review of the science of archaeology in the light of the last decade's revolutionary discoveries, discoveries which have transformed our views of our own origins and of the early history of mankind. From the two-million-year-old campsites of early man in Africa, the evidence of agriculture going back 10,000 years in Syria and New Guinea, and the traces of early Mesopotamian civilization reaching almost to India, to the spectacular finds of the third-millennium archive of Ebla and the tomb of Philip of Macedon, archaeologists have rapidly and radically extended the whole range of their inquiries. 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 geological time. This volume is encyclopaedic both in time and in space, giving a global account of the emergence of the human species up 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 Postglacial period: the beginnings of agriculture that established a new relationship with the natural environment and led to the great increase in human population, and the new forms of social organization that appeared with the emergence of 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 book has been prepared within a unified framework with the advice of a distinguished international board of editors. The maps and illustrations, many in full color, 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, chronological charts, global maps, bibliographies and an index." - Publisher.. 1st. Hardcover. Very Good/Fine. 4to.