A groundbreaking introduction to world prehistory that presents the vast panorama of human social, cultural and economic development over the past three million years

Here a team of leading archaeologists from Europe, North America and Australasia provide a seamless yet uniquely authoritative account of human prehistory.

The Human Past covers the deep prehistory of human evolution, the more recent prehistory of postglacial foragers and farmers, and the ancient civilizations of Egypt, the Mediterranean world, South and East Asia, and Central and South America.

It uses a regional and chronological framework, focusing as much on the archaeology of the everyday as on the spectacular and unusual.

The text is accompanied by hundreds of diagrams, maps and photographs, many in full colour, as well as clear timelines and boxes on key sites, methods, discoveries and controversies.

The most thorough yet accessible introduction ever published, The Human Past is an indispensable reference for students, scholars and teachers, and can be used either as a single coe text or in combination with other reading.

Chris Scarre is Deputy Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge and editor ot the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. He edited The Times Atlas of Archaeology, Monuments and Landscape in Atlantic Europe and The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World, and is co-author, with Brian Fagan, of the texbook Ancient Civilzations

753 illustrations, 211 in colour