Lost or abandoned cities, suddenly reclaimed for the modern world, are one of the most exciting aspects of archeology. These cities provide a tangible link with our ancestors, illuminating how and where they chose to live. Some cities like Pompeii, were literally stopped dead, and we see a frozen moment of everyday life in the first century. Others, like Troy, were gradually abandoned and left to the elements, and traces of the various settlements of different periods can all be found. Some cities were laid to waste by famine, others by war or the plague. All, however, bring lost and forgotten peoples back to life in startlingly vivid ways.
In this volume a team of experts have presented a wide variety of towns and cities across the globe, of different types and from different periods, showing the enormous range of the archeological record – and humanity's. There are the classic lost cities: Pompeii, Troy, Machu Pichu; but also the less well known – Tanis, Chan-Chan and Biskupin. Towns from Africa, the Far-East, Australia and the New World are all here, as well as the extraordinary cities of the Classical world and the Middle East.
Emphasis has traditionally been placed on the material remains of a society's elite – the palaces, tombs, temples, pyramids and other monumental structures and art that were solidly built, often on a massive scale, and which have therefore always been prominent features of the landscape. However, often more interesting is to investigate the houses and workshops of the craftworkers and other working classes. One can see the uses to which different quarters of the city were devoted, and how the system functioned as a whole.
Selected from every corner of the earth, the fifty great archeological discoveries beautifully illustrated and explored in this fascinating book demonstrate the enormous range of human life on our planet.


Dr. Paul G. Bahn is a freelance writer, translator and broadcaster in archeology. He obtained a doctorate in archaeology at Cambridge in 1979, specializing in the prehistory of the Pyrennes. He has lectured in China, the USA, Australia and Japan, as well as in western Europe, and has published over 300 papers and articles in journals of both sides of the Atlantic. He is the author of Journey through the Ice Age, the standard introduction to cave art; the co-author, with Colin Renfrew, of Archeology: Theories, Methods and Practice; and the editor of the Collins Dictionary of Archaeology and The Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology.