I wrote this book in 2007 and 2008 following a suggestion in 2005 by Simon Whitmore, formerly an editor at Cambridge University Press. I am grateful to him and to Beatrice Rehl, the present Humanities and Social Sciences editor at Cambridge University Press, New York, for their advice and patience during its gestation. It has been a great pleasure to continue my long and fruitful association with the Press.

It seemed arrogant and patronizing to write a book telling other archaeologists how to write, and I have remained acutely aware of this throughout my work on it. However, in no way should this book be thought of as a manual of instructions. This is certainly not intended. Rather the book consists of my own reflections on the task after more than a half-century of attempting to write about archaeology. My intention has been to encourage archaeological authors to think more critically about what they do and how they do it. I suggest that in order to write well about archaeology it is not enough to be an archaeologist; one must also learn how to write and each of us might achieve this in our own way. This opinion has been shaped by my contact with many other members of the archaeological profession over the years, too many to acknowledge here but all owed a debt of gratitude; to an extent each one of us is the sum of those we have known.