NONFICTION - April 23, 1995

TIME DETECTIVES: How Archaeologists Use Technology to Recapture the Past by Brian Fagan (Simon & Schuster: $24; 288 pp.). Yes, archeologists are shown using high technology in this book, but Brian Fagan, a professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, above all wants to pass on in “Time Detectives” his excitement about significant archeological sites, New World and Old. Everyone knows about radiocarbon dating; here we learn of its progeny, such as carbon-isotope analysis that allows scientists to determine through bone collagen the kind of plants eaten by ancient people, and thermoluminescence tests that help determine the original firing date of clay pots. We also hear of scientists who use infrared spectroscopy to analyze long-overlooked residues in Mediterranean amphorae, and others employing infrared photography to read writing otherwise invisible to the naked eye. The sophistication of modern archeology is of course a major theme in “Time Detectives”--its practitioners are more than meticulous “diggers”--but the main pleasure of the book lies in armchair excavation, such as that of the head-smashed-in bison jump site in Alberta, of the multitudinous bone fragments leading to verification of cannibalism among the Southwest’s Anasazi people, of ancient irrigation systems in the Andes that allowed archeologists to reclaim forgotten agricultural techniques. Many readers, no doubt, will also be intrigued by Fagan’s reproduction of a 4,000-year-old Sumerian beer recipe, which San Francisco’s Anchor Brewery attempted to duplicate a few years back.