Synopses & Reviews
Civilization takes the reader from the earliest days of human settlement to the civilizations of the New World overthrown by the Spanish conquistadors. After a brief look at humanity's development as monadic hunters and gatherers, the book opens with the crucial step taken around 10,000 years ago when some communities started to ultimate plants. The settled villages of these early farmers were the forerunners of the complex cities and highly sophisticated cultures that were later to flourish in the emergent civilizations around the world. Focusing largely on the world's key civilizations in each time period, the book begins with the primary civilizations in Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, and China, and from there to Greece, Rome, and their contemporary cultures, culminating in the settlements in the Americas. Illustrated with revealing photographs, artworks, and maps throughout, Civilizations brings alive the ideas, events, and people of earlier cultures whose achievements have laid the foundations of our present-day world.
Synopsis
Follow civilizations from the first human settlements in the New World. Learn why nomadic hunter and gatherers began cultivating plants and how small villages became complex cities and sophisticated cultures.
Synopsis
Discover the wonders of the universe. Includes new photographs from the Hubbell Space Telecape.
About the Author
Jane McIntosh is a freelance archaeological writer, editor, and consultant. Her doctoral and post-doctoral research was on the South Indian Iron Age, and she has considerable experience in archaeological fieldwork in India, Iraq, Cyprus, and Britain. Dr. McIntosh taught archaeology at Cambridge University. She has written a number of books and multimedia texts, including Atlas of the Ancient World CD-ROM (1998), The Practical Archaeologist (1999), and A Peaceful Realm: The Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization (2001). She has contributed many articles to encyclopedias, dictionaries, and atlases. Clint Twist studied history at Cambridge University and then worked as a consultant on various archaeology and museum projects in the Middle East. He has written over thirty books, including an eight-volume history of exploration. Many of these titles have been translated and published internationally. His recent projects include editing the Encyclopedia of Colonial America (1998); compiling World History (1999), a chronology of people and events; and writing Historical Atlas of the Celts (2001).
Table of Contents
Prehistory -- Cities and states -- Classical civilizations -- Empires of the New World.