Buried Beneath Us: Discovering the Ancient Cities of the Americas

Gr 6–10—Aveni discusses ancient urban centers of the Inca, Maya, Aztec, and Cahokia peoples. This volume goes beyond pyramids and recovered treasure, providing insight into the daily lives of the people who lived in the Americas in ancient times. Themes such as childhood, food preparation, and athletics are discussed. As compared to the plethora of juvenile titles on American archaeology, such as Jeremy Smith and Nicholas Saunders's The Aztecs (Gareth Stevens, 2005), which often break their pages up into various and disjointed box sections, this book is unusual in that the text has a singular, uniform narrative. The author occasionally jumps from one society to another between paragraphs, which may be confusing for some readers. In addition, Aveni, an accomplished anthropologist, sprinkles technical jargon here and there, and some discussions are somewhat generalized and hypothetical, such as the one on the development of religion in distant human history. Nevertheless, the work succeeds in relating that the Americas before 1492 had busy urban centers with complex, metropolitan dynamics. Roy's paintings are stylistic yet informative, and they would be even more marvelous if they were in color. Many of these fluid, motion-capturing images span two pages, breathing life into the work. Although the readership for this book is likely narrower than for Elizabeth Baquedano's Aztec, Inca & Maya (Knopf, 1993) of the popular "Eyewitness" books, Aveni provides a nice overview of ancient Native American urban life, making it a good read for students who have a serious interest in archaeology and anthropology. Great for social studies and history research projects.—Jeffrey Meyer, Mount Pleasant Public Library, IA