Books: Editors' Picks	Volume 60 Number 4, July/August 2007

Are We Rome? by Cullen Murphy (Hougton Mifflin, $24): A Vanity Fair editor and former Prince Valiant scribe compares the Roman and American empires and gives some advice on how we can avoid Rome's fate.

Sea of Mud by Gregg J. Dimmick (Texas State Historical Association, $25): A riveting account of an amateur archaeologist's search for the route of Santa Anna's 1836 retreat from Texas.

The Buried Book by David Damrosch (Henry Holt, $26): The remarkable discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh in the ruins of an Assyrian palace gets the popular account it deserves.

The Archaeology of Collective Action by Dean J. Saitta (University Press of Florida, $25): Archaeologists studying slave uprisings, protests, and labor strikes, including the infamous 1913 Ludlow massacre, are the heroes of this suprisingly readable volume.

© 2007 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/0707/trenches/human.html