Stuart Piggott (1910–1996)

largely dry and textbook-like, this work shines a light on history of the subcontinent going back 3 and 4 centuries as well as the historico-scientific techniques that makes it possible. textual analysis tells the detailed evolution of the chariot, etc. one thing that struck me, besides how revealing pottery shards are, was how uninviting the ancient cities seemed with dwellings lacking windows and portals on main streets.

This is a short introduction to Archaeology, at 150 pages. It sets out the general aims and methods of archaeology as a discipline, including its overlap and utilisation of neighbouring disciplines including geology, botany, and zoology. It emphasizes the differences in archeology when it is concerned with pre-historic vs historic civilisations, as well as the challenges involved in establishing chronologies and time lines.
While this is a good and readable introduction to archaeology, which show more covers many important aspects of the subject, I found it slightly less enjoyable than Leonard Wooley's introduction "Digging up the Past" due to his better communication of the excitement and intellectual rewards of archeology. There is some overlap between these volumes in content, however this book is slightly more recent and does cover some additional areas such as dating using pollen. show less

Prehistoric Societies takes us from the earliest evidence of human culture – the rock art and flint tools of the stone age hunter-gatherers, right through to the development of pottery, towns, and the bronze and iron ages and development of agriculture, cities, and complex civilisation that come to resemble more closesly our own.
This is very much a book written from an archaeological perspective, as archaological evidence is almost the only thing that can tell us anything about how show more prehistoric people lived, how their economies changed through the ages, what their beliefs might have been, what sort of buildings they probably lived in, and what they wore and ate.
This is quite a detailed book stretching to around 330 pages and plenty of illustrations. This length is appropriate given the vastness of the time periods it covers – hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago when the first stone tools were being made by non-human hominids, right up to the compartively recent pre-historic past of a few thousand BC.
This is a relatively readable book, and a fairly good introduction to Prehistory, though it doesn't as carefully avoid using non-specialist terms, or at least go to the same lengths to explain them, as many popular accounts do. Also, having been written over 50 years ago, it is somewhat out of date in that a lot of new discoveries have been made since then. For example, the oldest known cultures have been discovered further into the past now, and more evidence has been gathered using new techniques such as genetics, which have provided us with a much improved understanding of the past and how and where it was populated with different varieties of extinct anthropoids. This being said, the vast majority of Prehistory, as this book says, is lost forever to human knowledge, as only certain types of material traces are left to survive the huge timescales involved. For this reason, the job of the archaeologist, and the glimpses we see of these long distant cultures are made even more intriguing. show less

This is a small book that manages to review most of the information available about historical druids we know today, even though it was written over 30 years ago.

The author concetrates on the pre-modern druids and only makes passing remarks about the modern groups, and these are rather unflattering, but there are other books, more recently written, that cover the history of modern druidry in more detail.

I found the information presented in an easy to digest format, enhanced by a few good show more illustrations and a bibliography allowing further reading.

I enjoyed this little pelican paperback and will happily recommend it as a starter book to those seeking out a good history of the ancient class of people known as druids. show less