Andrew Sherratt (1946–2006)

From two-million-year-old kitchen-middens in Africa to evidence of 10,000 years of agriculture in Niu Gini, and the revolutionary discoveries in Macedonia, tracing the movement of human species in time and space. Compilation of articles by largely British scholars opening up the major themes and describing the often laborious enterprises across the callings of all the specialties from all the sciences. Wow -- this is a coming of age reference book for Archaeology. (Compare, Ashmolean Museum.) Now, "history" no longer depends on writings and stones. The Whole Story of existence on Earth is read from the entire "book" of material. The archaeological emphasis on material conditions rather than theoretical, political, or military accounts, is shown to have a major impact on our views of "humanity". In addition, these studies open up the time-scale, describing processes rather than events, and the regularities of change rather than the impact of a contingent circumstance. The time-scale given along the horizontal axis is a logarithmic one, so comparisons can be made from a glance at a single diagram [418]. From the Introduction: "The key to an understanding of this scale of development lies in controlled comparison - the recognition of regularities in the development of human societies in diverse circumstances and of the similarities and differences that have arisen among them." The discipline of archaeology compasses the comparisons and reveals a common history. With calibrated radio-carbon and other dating technologies, fieldworkers can pin-point the age of the discoveries.
Includes a Chronological Atlas (series of globes showing the emergence and expansion of human activity), a detailed Bibliography and Index.… (meer)