Ancient Civilizations offers a comprehensive and straightforward account of the world's first civilizations and how they were discovered, drawing on many avenues of inquiry including archaeological excavations, surveys, laboratory work, highly specialized scientific investigations, and both historical and ethnohistorical records. This book covers the earliest civilizations and the great powers in the Near East, moving on to the first Aegean civilizations, the Mediterranean world in the first millennium, Imperial Rome, northeast Africa, the divine kings in southeast Asia, and empires in East Asia, as well as early states in the Americas and Andean civilization. Ancient Civilizations includes a number of features to support student learning: a wealth of images, including several new illustrations; feature boxes which expand on key sites, finds and written sources; and an extensive guide to further reading. With new perceptions of the origin and collapse of states, including a review of the issue of sustainability, this fourth edition has been extensively updated in the light of spectacular new discoveries and the latest theoretical advances. Examining the world's pre-industrial civilizations from a multidisciplinary perspective and offering a comparative analysis of the field which explores the connections between all civilizations around the world, Scarre and Fagan, both established authorities on world prehistory, provide a valuable introduction to pre-industrial civilizations in all their brilliant diversity.

Author Biography

CHRIS SCARRE is an archaeologist specializing in the prehistory of Europe and the Mediterranean, with a particular interest in the archaeology of Atlantic facade. He has participated in fieldwork projects in Britain, France, Greece, and India, and has directed excavations at Neolithic sites in France, Portugal and the Channel Islands. Formerly Deputy Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, he is now Professor of Archaeology at Durham University, UK, and editor of the leading international journal of archaeology Antiquity. BRIAN FAGAN is one of the world's leading archaeological writers and an internationally recognized authority on world prehistory. He is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he specialized in writing and lecturing about archaeology to wide audiences. Professor Fagan has written several best-selling textbooks: Ancient Lives: An Introduction to Archaeology and Prehistory; Archaeology: A Brief Introduction; Archaeology and You; In the Beginning: An Introduction to Archaeology; A Brief History of Archaeology: Classical Times to the Twenty-First Century; People of the Earth; and World Prehistory: A Brief Introduction.