The Maya has long been established as the best, most accessible introduction to the New World's greatest ancient civilization. Coe and Houston update this classic by distilling the latest scholarship for the general listener and student. This new edition incorporates the most recent archaeological and epigraphic research, which continues to proceed at a fast pace. Among the finest new discoveries are spectacular stucco sculptures at El Zotz and Holmul,...

"Rachel Morgan's frank and incisive history begins with Richard Wetherill's "discovery" of Mesa Verde in Colorado in 1888. Subsequent expeditions by amateurs, looters, and budding professional archaeologists abetted the devastation of Indigenous sites throughout the Southwest. These expeditions became the proving grounds for different conceptions of what archaeology should be and how it should be practiced. Ultimately, revulsion at the work of nineteenth-century...

Scandinavia is home to prolific and varied rock art images among which the ship motif is prominent. Because of this, the rock art of Scandinavia has often been interpreted in terms of social ritual, cosmology, and religion associated with the maritime sphere. This comprehensive review is based on the creation of a Scandinavia-wide GIS database for prehistoric rock art and reexamines theoretical approaches and interpretations, in particular with regard...

Dolmens are iconic international monumental constructions which represent the first megalithic architecture (after menhirs) in north-west Europe. These monuments are characterised by an enormous capstone balanced on top of smaller uprights. However, previous investigations of these extraordinary monuments have focussed on three main areas of debate. First, typology has been a dominant feature of discussion, particularly the position of dolmens in...

Egyptian art is perhaps the most impersonal that exists. The artist effaces himself. But he has such an innate sense of life, a sense so directly moved and so limpid that everything of life which he describes seems defined by that sense, to issue from the natural gesture, from the exact attitude, in which one no longer sees stiffness. His impersonality resembles that of the trees bowing in the wind with a single movement and without resistance, or...

Describes the pyramids of Egypt and the Americas and their significance in the social, political, and religious life of long-vanished civilizations.

Examines the history, culture, and architecture of the legendary Anasazi people in an attempt to discover who they were and why they abandoned their civilization more than seven centuries ago.

J. M. Adovasio has spent the last thirty years at the center of one of our most fiery scientific debates: Who were the first humans in the Americas, and how and when did they get there? At its heart, The First Americans is the story of the revolution in thinking that Adovasio and his fellow archaeologists have brought about, and the firestorm it has ignited. As he writes, "The work of lifetimes has been put at risk, reputations have been damaged,...

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights. The great Biblical flood so described in Genesis has long been a subject of fascination and speculation. In the 19th century the English archbishop James Ussher established it as having happened...

(From t.p.) Book I. Containing the five orders and the most necessary observations in building -- Book II. In which the designs of several houses ordered by him ... are comprised, and the designs of the ancient houses of the Greeks and Latins -- Book III. Wherein the ways, bridges, piazzas, basilica's, and xisti are treated of -- Book IV. Describing and figuring the ancient temples that are in Rome and some others that are in Italy and out of Italy...