This title provides a provocative treatise by an internationally renown archaeologist on the creative role of archaeology in bringing the past into the present, accessible to nonspecialists and students. Archaeology is a way of acting and thinking - about what is left of the past, about temporality of humans and their material lives, about the processes of order and entropy, and about processes of creating, consuming and discarding at the heart of human experience. These elements, and the techniques archaeologists follow to uncover them, are the essence of the archaeological imagination. In this extended essay, renowned archaeological theorist Michael Shanks offers a window on this imaginative world of past and present and the creative role archaeology can play in uncovering it, analyzing it, and interpreting it.