ARCHAEOLOGY BY Dr. Francis Celoria
Francis Celoria is a practical archaeologist of the
first rank and a teacher. This paper-back is a most
courageous attempt to cover the great field of world-wide
archaeology in 150 pages, "for the newcomer to the subject".
It would ill-become me to complain of minor omissions: indeed
it is remarkable how much factual information the author has
contrived to present with a minimum of technical terms and
a maximum of coloured illustrations.
Having said this, I must confess I find throughout a
lack of pattern and cohesion surprising in a professional
teacher. Apart from an admirable Introduction in most
general terms, there is no attempt to present an outline
account, period-by—period, so that the newcomer may have a
bird's-eye view of the whole subject before proceeding to
descriptions in detail. Moreover, although 'culture' is
mentioned on the first page of the text and 'civilisation'
not very much later, the reader has to get to p.116 before
being given a formal definition of what the archaeological
scholar means by these basic terms. Again, 'cores' are not
mentioned until well after 'flakes', and nowhere is there a
clear explanation of these two great classes of flint tools.
It may not irritate all readers, but I found such
careless writing as "...huge mounds (either for rituals and
(sic) for burials..." a nuisance; there are more than a few
such passages, where the reader has to substitute his own
corrections. Again, on p.142, his inadequate explanation
of Dendrochronology (which he names for the first time a
page later without relating it to his foregoing explanation)
contains a numerical error, which might well puzzle the
beginner, as also does the illustration on p.141. The
caption there reads "Radiocarbon dating lab. The Fluorine
content increases with time". The uninstructed reader might
easily suppose that these were two aspects of a single recent
technique, whereas of course, they are quite unconnected.
The lower half of the illustration shows an animal bone and
a Neanderthal skull, apparently both with equal fluorine
content, hinted at by blue stripes of the same length, but
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