FINDING THE LOST CITIES

Stefoff (Charles Darwin, 1996, etc.) blows the dust off 13 of archaeology's greatest triumphs, and the careers of the scientists and adventurers who forged them during the field's ``heroic age'' (from Napoleon's 1798 Egyptian expedition to Howard Carter's first glimpse of Tutankhamen's treasure in 1922) and beyond. To the often-told tales of Schliemann at Troy, Evans at Knossos, and Layard at Nineveh, Stefoff adds plenty of lesser-known discoveries, including Harriet Boyd's excavations at Gournia, known as ``the most perfectly preserved small Minoan town'', rancher Richard Wetherill's discovery of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, and Nicholas Clapp's inspired use of satellite photography to locate the buried city of Ubar on the Arabian peninsula. From the discovery of Cop†n's royal tombs in the late 1980s to the even more recent excavation of a Byzantine church at Petra, many sites are yielding treasures even after decades of digging. Though the author includes too many general accounts of various civilizations that are more suited to textbook or encyclopedia articles, the currency of her information, the expertise with which she picks out intriguing details, plus the trenchant contrast she draws between the destructive methods of early treasure hunters and today's careful scientists, make this must reading for students of the past. Profusely illustrated with full-color and black-and-white photographs. (chronology, further reading, index) (Nonfiction. 12+)