Archaeology

Our Archaeology shelf spans everything from accessible popular titles on famous excavations to more technical site reports and academic surveys. Readers come to this section for the same reason they come to Anthropology, curiosity about how earlier peoples lived, but with a sharper focus on physical evidence: tools, settlements, burial sites, and the methods used to interpret them.

We regularly receive strong titles on North American archaeology, including material relevant to the long human history of the Bow Valley and the wider Canadian Rockies, alongside classic studies of better-known sites in Europe, the Middle East, and Mesoamerica.

Because academic archaeology titles are often printed in small runs by university presses, this is another category where our used inventory can turn up books that are otherwise very difficult to source new, particularly site-specific excavation reports that were never intended for a general readership.

We also stock a selection of books on archaeological method and dating techniques, useful for students and amateur enthusiasts alike, along with popular narrative accounts that read almost like detective stories built around a single dig.

This section changes slowly compared with our fiction shelves, since the underlying findings it describes do not go out of date the way current events do.

That makes it a reliable place to build a personal reference collection over several visits rather than needing to buy everything at once, and a number of our customers do exactly that, adding a volume or two each season.

• Excavation and site reports
• North American and Canadian archaeology
• Ancient civilizations and world archaeology
• Academic and university press titles
• Archaeological methods and dating techniques
• Field manuals and survey guides
• Popular introductions to the field
• Narrative accounts of major digs

This section rewards the kind of reader who enjoys evidence and inference as much as narrative. A site report and a popular account of the same excavation sitting side by side let a customer compare the raw findings against the story later told about them.

More than a few of our regulars make a habit of doing exactly that before forming their own opinion on a disputed interpretation, and we try to shelve related titles close enough together to make the comparison easy.

A large share of archaeological writing exists as reports, monographs, and conference volumes produced in very small numbers for a professional readership. Copies surface irregularly and rarely twice.

If you are researching a specific site or region, it is worth telling us. We can flag material as it arrives rather than leaving it to chance on a return visit.