"The knobbiest town in the world"--so Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) described Jerusalem in The Innocents Abroad, a travelogue of his visit to the Holy Land in 1867 (Fig. 0.7). He was struck by the Old City's small size; the small white domes protruding like knobs from the flat roofs of the tightly-packed houses; the narrow, crooked, uneven stone-paved streets; the poverty and filth; and the throngs of beggars: "To see the numbers of maimed, malformed...

"For millennia, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World have been known for their aesthetic sublimity, ingenious engineering, and sheer, audacious magnitude: The Great Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis, the Statue of Zeus, the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse at Alexandria. Echoing down time, each of these persists in our imagination as an emblem of the glory of antiquity,...

"Where do human societies come from? The drive to answer this question took on a new urgency in the nineteenth century, when a generation of archaeologists began to look beyond the bible for the origins of different cultures and civilizations. A child of the San Francisco Gold Rush whose mother was born in Mexico City, Zelia Nuttall threw herself into the study of Aztec customs and cosmology, eager to use the tools of the emerging science of anthropology...