If anyone predicted, back in 1986 when I fi rst began circulating the manuscript for this book, that in 2013 I’d be working on its eighth edition, that the book would be used in college courses all across the United States and Canada, and that cable television documentarians would regularly invite me to be a talking head concerning topics dealt with in the book, I would have thought they were crazy. I no longer remember the precise number of rejection letters my unsolicited manuscript initially produced; I stopped counting at sixteen. Those letters were dreary in their sameness—metaphorical pats on the head for producing an “unusual manuscript” that seemed very interesting, but not one that might lead to a book that archaeologists would be willing to consider for adoption in their courses. After all, the rejection letters maintained, a semester is already too short a period of time to cover all the methodology that should be covered in an introductory archaeology course. That same semester framework, I was told, hardly allowed suffi cient time in a world prehistory survey course to cover the breadth of genuine human antiquity, let alone the deadends of frauds and myths. There just wouldn’t be enough time in standard archaeology and prehistory courses, or so the rejection letters maintained, to include a deconstruction of preexisting misapprehensions students might harbor about the archaeological record and its study. And while the book seemed well suited to a course dedicated to the discussion of popular misconceptions about antiquity—the discussion, in fact, of “frauds, myths, and mysteries” about the human past—the unanimous opinion of the rejection letter writers was that there couldn’t be very many such courses in the fi rst place.