Publisher's Synopsis
"Preface Wait. You're reading this? You're reading the Preface? Huh? I mean, nothing in here is going to be on the test. If I were you, I'd skip this and get to the good stuff starting in Chapter 1. But if you really want to know, here's the deal for this new edition. Mid-twentieth-century British author L. P. Hartley begins his novel The Go-Between with the now-iconic phrase: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Now, in the context of that book, Hartley's reference is to an elderly man inspired to think about the trajectory of his own life while going through some of his old junk. I am not the first person to use Hartley's phrase as a metaphor for the broader pursuit of historians and archaeologists who, through reference to the old junk in the world's attic or basement, think about the trajectory of the broader human story. Indeed, the human past is like a foreign country where things are done differently
