No society on earth has been without curiosity about its past, a trait that yields folklore and history. Alain Schnapp, a professor of archaeology at the University of Paris, looks at an allied curiosity: that about the things of a people's past. In this comprehensive, heavily illustrated history of early European archaeology, he looks at Greek and Roman ideas about what was to them antiquity; examines the first inklings of scientific archaeology in the Renaissance; and delves into the formation of the first professional archaeological societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Schnapp writes with a keen eye for the telling anecdote, recounting, for instance, a German scholar's refuting a commonly held view that ancient burial urns had grown in potato fields by spontaneous generation. Schnapp makes occasional detours into archaeology on other continents, too.