Verdwenen beschavingen

great book. lots of explanations. great pictures. unusual places ( )

Expanded awareness of ancient sites.... ( )

A coffee table-style book showcasing the ruins of great, vanished civilizations from Machu Picchu to Pompeii to Angkor Wat. For each site there are a few pages describing the culture and history of the people who lived there, sometimes along with a discussion of how the ruins where discovered and excavated. These generally convey little more than a broad overview, of course, and the writing style sometimes makes me feel as if I'm reading text off a museum exhibit, but they do feature some interesting details. The color pictures, which include photos of ruins and artifacts as well as a few computer-aided artists' reconstructions of what the sites might have looked like in their heyday, are generally much more effective at exciting the imagination, though. Oddly enough, despite the title, there isn't really all that much about the use of new technologies in archeology. There are a few pages in the introduction about remote sensing, and a few more mentions in the sidebars featuring quotes from archaeologists that accompany each chapter, but generally there's at most a short concluding paragraph or two saying something like, "and today we're using new techniques to learn more."

I did have to roll my eyes a little at the inclusion of a section on Atlantis, although at least the discussion of it is sane. Mostly it boils down to something like, "If Plato didn't just make the whole thing up -- which it's fairly likely he did -- then maybe it was inspired by the island of Thera. Or maybe not." Yeah, OK, whatever.

Considerably more bothersome is the fact that there's some kind of formatting or editing problem affecting a couple of paragraphs in the first section, on the Anasazi culture of the American southwest. At least several lines of the text appear to be missing and/or garbled, making a fair chunk of it effectively unreadable. I find this particularly irritating, because the Anasazi ruins are the only ones in the book that I've actually visited, and I was hoping to see a good writeup on them. ( )