Discovery of the Past

A feast for the mind and eye, Schnapp's adventurous, unorthodox study will appeal to connoisseurs, art and archeology buffs and the intellectually curious. His theme is how we retrieve, preserve and interpret the past, primarily through archeology but also through antiquities, histories and poetry. The text hops from the amazing terra-cotta army of a third-century B.C. Chinese emperor, to seventh-century Persian cave reliefs, to Charlemagne's self-bolstering rediscovery of Rome's classical traditions, to Thomas Jefferson's excavation of a Native American barrow in Virginia in 1781. Schnapp, professor of Greek archeology at the University of Paris, where he also heads the department of the history of art and archeology, explores here how archeological finds have shaped our understanding of the origins of European cultures and of humanity's evolutionary beginnings and earliest history. One of his central arguments is that archeology's roots are much older than most experts have assumed--Babylonians, Egyptians and Chinese navigators of the Pacific all excavated remnants of the past. The esoteric, intriguing illustrations range from Chinese bronze dragons from around 1700 B.C. to Rubens's color drawing of an Egyptian mummy. This serendipitous study expands our notions of how archeology acts as a filter of the past. Natural Science Book Club main selection. (Apr.)