Brian Fagan is one of the world's leading archaeological writers and an internationally recognized authority on world prehistory. He is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His other textbooks include A Brief History of Archaeology; Ancient Civilizations (with Chris Scarre); Ancient Lives: An Introduction to Archaeology and Prehistory; In the Beginning; People of the Earth (both with Nadia Durrani); and World Prehistory: A Brief Introduction. He is also the author of numerous general books on archaeology. Nadia Durrani is a Cambridge University-trained archaeologist and writer, with a PhD from University College, London, in Arabian archaeology. She is former editor of Britain's best-selling archaeology magazine, Current World Archaeology. and has authored and edited many hundreds of articles on archaeology from every corner of the globe, contributed to dozens of books, and written two: The Tihamah Coastal Plain of South-West Arabia; and In Search of the Zeppelin War: the archaeology of the First Blitz (with Neil Faulkner).