FINDING THE FORGOTTEN: Adventures in the Discovery of the Past

Plunging with nary a word about theory into a fragmentary Chronicle of the discovery of the Hittite empire (itself a singularly diffuse undertaking), Mr. Frimmer embarks on a motley survey of archaeology. Chapter two at first promises a belated methodological introduction but it soon digresses into a history of knowledge (?) from Herodotus to the Renaissance. The names and sites that follow lose all individuation, significance, and character, being subsumed under meaningless headings in arid, unstructured exposition. All the people and places are here -- stultifyingly; not here, conspicuously, are maps or timetables or illustrations. Even the informational value is nullified by an ineffectual index, and what with the darting about the book makes a morass of the past. Happily, there are others that don't.