The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies

In The Human Past, a team of leading archaeologists, all well-known specialists in their fields, provides a seamless yet uniquely authoritative account of human prehistory on a global scale. It highlights the enormous diversity of human experience and the ways in which archaeologists are able to learn about it. This includes the deep prehistory of human evolution, the more recent prehistory of postglacial foragers and farmers, and the literate civilizations of Egypt, the Mediterranean world, South and East Asia, and Central and South America. It provides an introductory account that takes the student through the human past using a regional and chronological framework, focusing as much on the archaeology of the everyday as on the spectacular and unusual. The text is accompanied by hundreds of specially commissioned diagrams and photographs, many in full colour, that illustrate key sites, artifacts and regions, as well as clear timelines, boxes on key sites, methods, discoveries and controversies, and maps.