Cline is a professor of archaeology who also practices what he teaches, and his book is both a congenial tour through sites including Petra, Ebla, Peru’s Nazca Lines, and the Uluburun shipwreck off the coast of Turkey, as well as a primer on how archeology works, from the actual digging (which he likens to gardening) to the ethics of what happens to the artifacts: who do they belong to? And, more important, how can we save these irreplaceable sites—and humanity’s common heritage—from the looting and deliberate destruction that’s on the rise worldwide? Cline is a master storyteller and however much you think you know about Pompeii or Qin Shi Huang’s Terracotta Army, he will tell you more—including all that we don’t know for sure. Was there really a Trojan Horse? It may be a metaphor for an earthquake that destroyed Troy. Why these civilizations ended—some after hundreds of years—is often the biggest mystery. And it becomes our mystery, too, when Cline ask us to imagine archeologists of the future unearthing today’s cities. What rituals would they read into the remains of a Starbucks? What clues would they find to the end of our era?