This engaging work uses key discoveries, events, people, techniques, and controversies to give the general reader a rich history of archaeology from its beginnings in the 16th century to the present. The history of archaeology leads from the musty collections of dilettante antiquarians to high-tech science. The book identifies three major developmental periods—Birth of Archaeology (16th–18th centuries), Archaeology of Origins and Empires (19th century), and World Archaeology (20th century). An introductory essay acquaints the reader with the essence of the science for each period. The short entries comprising the balance of the book expand on the themes introduced in the essays. Organized around personalities, techniques, controversies, and conflicts, the encyclopedia brings to life the history of archaeology. It broadens the general reader's knowledge by detailing the professional significance of widely known discoveries while introducing to wider knowledge obscure but important moments in archaeology. Archaeology is replete with the visionaries and swashbucklers of popular myth; it is also filled with careful and dedicated scientists.

In this major work Professor MacDonald chronicles an intensive and systematic archaeological survey of the southern flank of the Wadi el Hasa in West–Central Jordan. The survey resulted in the recovery of human evidence spanning the Lower Paleolithic to the Ottoman period (500,000 B.C.–A.D. 1918). The area is cut by a number of impressive and deep, south–to–north flowing wadis. As a region marginal for farming but stable for grazing, it would be the first to “empty out” and the last to “fill up” compared to more favourable regions. The methodology employed included a combination of purposive, predictive, and pedestrian transects. Lithics spanning the Lower Paleolithic to the end of the Early Bronze period (500,000–2000 B.C.) and ceramics covering the period from the Pottery Neolithic to the end of the Ottoman domination (4750 B.C.–A.D. 1918) were collected in the area. Sites surveyed included lithic and sherd scatters, camps, hamlets, villages, roads, milestones, fortresses, watchtowers, and mills. This research sheds new light on the settlement of the area, which now appears to have been most dense during the Middle Paleolithic, Iron II, Nabataean, and Byzantine periods.

' This new journal from Brill makes many important promises to all scholars interested in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East and the interactions between them. ... By opening a regular avenue for cooperation and conversation among scholars from many disciplines and countries, AWE has a real potential for fulfilling the promises it makes. '// BMCR , 2003.

Ancient Irrigation Systems in the Aral Sea Area, is the English translation of Boris Vasilevich Andrianov's work, Drevnie orositelnye sistemy priaralya , concerning the study of ancient irrigation systems and the settlement pattern in the historical region of Khorezm, south of the Aral Sea (Uzbekistan). This work holds a special place within the Soviet archaeological school because of the results obtained through a multidisciplinary approach combining aerial survey and fieldwork, surveys, and excavations. This translation has been enriched by the addition of introductions written by several eminent scholars from the region regarding the importance of the Khorezm Archaeological-Ethnographic Expedition and the figure of Boris V. Andrianov and his landmark study almost 50 years after the original publication.