Tout sur l’archéologie

In a world that is constantly moving, increasingly living to a staccato rhythm, we all need points of reference. Mementos, compendiums and other address books have always existed and now present a new breed. It can be looked at in 3 minutes (this is the title of a collection), or when more rested, there is enough here to build a culture by proxy – without reading the original works or visiting the sites. In this field, we would take irony, or originality in the classification (Phaidon recently published quite an interesting retro-story of art), or clarity. This book on a difficult discipline (archeology) can be classified in the last category. The few thousand years of our history are sifted through chronologically at a good pace. For each of the five large periods (until 1600, even if we know we can do archeology on the site where the movie Peau d’âne was shot!), a map announces the fifty sites that will soon be summed up in two pages, combining description, biographies, and a large map. Babylonia and Teotihuacán are among them, as well as lesser-known sites and moments such as Caral in Peru or the siege of Lakish by the Assyrians. Pick away, something will always remain!

• Tout sur l’archéologie, collective work directed by Paul Bahn, Flammarion, 2018, 576 p., €35.

9782081421530