Europe Before Rome: A Site-by-Site Tour of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages

摘要

In recent decades, archaeologists, geneticists, and other scholars have revolutionized the study of prehistoric Europe. They have uncovered stone tools and gnawed bones that humanoid creatures left behind more than a million years ago. They have shown how a quarter of a million years ago, Neanderthals controlled fire, cared for their elderly and sick, and buried their dead in the expectation of an afterlife. Most striking is new information about a number of advanced Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations, not just in the Mediterranean but throughout northern Europe, that boasted large cities, delicate art, sophisticated technology, and complex trading routes reaching all the way to China.