Book excerpt: Schliemann's excavation is but the opening chapter in this exciting story of what modern science has revealed about the ancient cultures of the Aegeans and Grecians. It is a story that begins with the potsherds of Neolithic villages and climaxes in the glories of Lyric, Classical and Hellenistic Greece. Among its fascinating events is Ventris' deciphering of the archaic Linear B script, a breakthrough which revealed the secrets of the fabulous Minoan civlization. Wedding the complex techniques of such archaeological methods as the carbon-14 dating of artifacts to an astonishingly complete cultural history of man in Greece, the author has produced a lavishly illustrated study that will interest nonprofessionals as much as archaeologists, historians, travelers and students of the fine arts.