Books with author Professor Alex Woolf

Imagine a world without fire. There would be no cooked food, no artificial light and no way of keeping warm in a cool climate. Fire can be dangerous, but over thousands of years we have learned to tame it. We use it to make pottery, glass and metals. It enabled us to invent the steam engine, the internal combustion engine and the rocket. Where would we be without it?

Can you imagine what our lives would be like after devastating events such as an asteroid strike, a nuclear disaster, or an outbreak of super-plague? Have you ever thought about what will happen if we run out of fossil fuels? This series traces the possible consequences of a global event on such a scale, with ideas and evidence based on similar scenarios that are a part of fact and fiction.

How have technology and science helped historians and archaeologists through the years? How does today's technology help us understand the past? What role does technology hold for the future of history studies? From the invention of metal detectors through to today's computer modelling of long-dead people, our knowledge of the past has always been improving thanks to technology. This book looks at historical, current and future techniques for helping us discover traces of the past from artifacts to human remains. We look at how dating these things has become more accurate and also how the internet is giving us more access to historical records than ever before.