Some of the most spectacular discoveries about our past have come not from written records but from the extraordinary finds and investigations of such men as Jean-Francois Champollion, French decoder of Egyptian hieroglyphs; Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, the first men to study the prehistoric mounds of America's Mississippi Valley; Arthur Evans, British excavator of the Minoan place of Knossos; and Howard Carter, discoverer of the tomb of King Tutankhamun. In the Archaeologists, editor Paul Bahn and his crack team of regional specialists tell the fascinating story of archaeology from a fresh and exciting angle: they explore, continent by continent and region by region, the achievements and discoveries of these excavators of humanity's distant past. The volume opens with an investigation of the earliest beginnings of archaeology in different parts of the world, and how it developed from a pastime for antiquarians and collectors to a serious scientific attempt to obtain information about past societies. Thereafter, a sequence of chapters examines the work of the most important archaeologists working in twelve geographical areas: Europe, the Aegean World, Greece and Rome, Egypt, West and Southern Asia, Africa, Russia, Mesoamerica, South America, North America, The Far East and Australasia. The lives and characters of the archaeologists are as compelling as their finds were ground-breaking. And with its detailed coverage of archaeology's most celebrated discoveries, from Petra to Nineveh, from the Rosetta Stone to Machu Picchu, The Archaeologists is a beautifully illustrated introduction to archaeology and its most celebrated practitioners that has both the accessibility to appeal to the inquisitive layperson and the authority to satisfy the seasoned collegiate archaeologist.