In Prehistory, the award-winning archaeologist and renowned
scholar Colin Renfrew covers human existence before the advent of
written records–the overwhelming majority of our time here on
earth–and gives an incisive, concise, and lively survey of the
past, and of how scholars and scientists labor to bring it to
light.
Renfrew begins by looking at prehistory as a discipline,
detailing how breakthroughs such as radiocarbon dating and DNA
analysis have helped us to define humankind’s past–how things have
changed–much more clearly than was possible just a half century
ago. As for why things have changed, Renfrew pinpoints some of the
issues and challenges, past and present, that confront the study of
prehistory and its investigators. Renfrew then offers a summary of
human prehistory from early hominids to the rise of literate
civilization that is refreshingly free of conventional wisdom and
grand “unified” theories.
In this invaluable account, Colin Renfrew delivers a meticulously
researched and passionately argued chronicle about our life on
earth–and our ongoing quest to understand it.
關於作者:
Colin Renfrew was professor of archaeology from 1981 to 2004
at Cambridge University, where he is now a Fellow of the McDonald
Institute for Archaeological Research. Also a Fellow of the British
Academy, he has won numerous international medals and prizes and
was made a life peer in 1991. A leading figure in archaeology
worldwide, he has led many excavations, especially in Greece. He is
co-author, with Paul Bahn, of Archaeology: Theories, Methods,
and Practice, the definitive student reference.