Time Detectives: Their Toughest Cases in Their Own Words

This exhilarating mix of high adventure and serious scholarship explores how modern archeologists are using techniques like computer imaging, infrared photography and pollen analysis to reconstruct ancient cultures. Fagan (The Rape of the Nile), an archaeologist, describes Tiwanaku, a vanished city on Lake Titicaca's Bolivian shore (A.D. 5th-11th centuries), where Andean farmers used crop cultivation methods that are now being copied by modern villagers to increase yields. He visits enigmatic Flag Fen in eastern England, where an enormous Bronze Age timber platform rose amid uninhabited wetlands, the site of sacrificial offerings. He combs Wadi Kubbaniya, an obscure Egyptian valley, home to hunter-gatherers 10,000 years before the pharaohs-possible ancestors of ancient Egyptian civilization. He explains how excavations of the mansions and gardens of 18th-century colonial Annapolis, Md., are revealing class divisions between a white elite and African Americans who comprised as much as one-third of the population. Fagan also explores multistory New Mexican pueblos of the Anasazi, a Sumerian temple complex, Blackfoot bison hunt sites on Canadian cliffs and remnants of the Natufian culture-some of the world's earliest farmers-discovered in the 1930s in what is now Israel. Illustrated. (Feb.)