Paul G. Bahn - Great Sites of the Ancient World

The fourth-century B.C.E. tholos at Delphi, Greece.

Indeed, if asked to name an archaeologist, most people today would probably come up with Indiana Jones; but real archaeology is worlds away from that swashbuckling fictional hero. It is not just about treasure or rich burials, though it is no less exciting for all that. It is true that, decades ago, and more, it was indeed a subject focused on spectacular discoveries and exotic finds, but over the years, as it grew into a serious discipline, and aspired to be scientific, archaeology became increasingly concerned with the more mundane aspects of the past, and with the traces of the lives of ordinary people rather only those of kings, queens, and emperors. It now concentrated not on finding things, but on finding out things, on trying to explain when and where and how and why things happened and changed in the past.

Inevitably it can sometimes be tempting for archaeologists to overinterpret, to go beyond the hard evidence into the realms of pure speculationmore often than not, this is done to satisfy the medias thirst for simple answers to complex problems. Today, it is often frowned upon to say we dont know, let alone we shall never know, even when these are the correct and honest answers. The hitherto unimagined analytical techniques available to us have led some researchers to a curious optimism that nothing is now unknowablebut unless and until a time machine is invented, it is hard to see how most of our deductions about the past will ever be tested, far less verified.

It is also only comparatively recently that archaeological excavation and museum curation previously conducted without the slightest consultation with, or permission sought from, local groups have begun to be undertaken with a bit more consultation and sensitivity, particularly when indigenous groups (in North America, Australia, or New Zealand, for example) or religious groups (most notably in Israel) have serious objections. This in turn has had profound effects on how sites and collections are displayed and interpreted for the public, and on the explicit and implicit messages that are conveyed in this way.

Because a great deal of groundless nonsense about archaeology and the past is promulgated on TV and the web, it is always worthwhile to produce a book that sets out the real past, the astonishing variety of human achievements, the end products of our ancestors sweat and ingenuity. Based on solid evidence, the pages in this volume not only explain what archaeologists do and how they make their deductions, but also, we hope, go a little way toward counteracting the wilder speculation that is sometimes seen.

The Past is Human

Only archaeology can uncover and elucidate the wonders of past times and the astonishing achievements of our forebears. It is still a very young discipline, though, and the contents of this book can only cover a fraction of what has been recovered and learned in a couple of centuries. We have come a long way from the crude, fumbling digs of the nineteenth century, which usually employed laborers armed with pickaxes and shovels (and sometimes even explosives), to rip objects out of the ground without the context that tells us so much. This caused the destruction of vast quantities of crucial and irreplaceable information.

However, we need to judge those early archaeologists in the context of their time. Who, in the nineteenth century, would recognize the slow, painstaking excavations of today, aided by aerial photography, radiocarbon dating, remote sensing, computers, or genetic analysis? It is likely that in another 150 years, archaeologists will look back on our own efforts as worthy and well-meaning, but primitive and unimaginative. Faced with the incredible pace of technological development, we simply cannot imagine what the ever-growing and improving battery of archaeological and scientific techniques will reveal about our past during the next century, or what information our descendants will be able to extract from the apparently insignificant material traces of the past.

The main entrance of the Angkor Wat complex, Cambodia.

The future therefore looks as exciting as the past. The real joy of archaeology is that it is constantly changing through an endless stream of new discoveries, any one of which can radically alter our picture of the past: it may be a new kind of fossil human, an earlier date for a phenomenon (such as pottery or cremation) or for an event (like the arrival of humans in the New World or Australia), or something completely unexpected like the body of King Richard III turning up under a car park in Leicestera find that immediately became a major news story all over the world in 2013.

Our Selection of Sites

It is inevitable that a book such as this, which sets out to present the world of archaeology through just one hundred places, is forced to a large extent to feature only the most famous and most visited sites. But we wanted to introduce readers to other places that are doubtless far less known yet of great interest and importance. Above all we sought to feature a wide variety of sitesnot just palaces and tombs, but caves and cities, rock art and sanctuaries. Collectively, they span a period from our earliest ancestors to an event as recent as the Battle of the Little Big Horn.