If reporters write the first draft of history, explorers and archaeologists produce the first sketches of prehistory. Surveying a ruin before few suspected that anything existed there before, and until recently feeling free to carry off artefacts in the name of art and science, they have enjoyed the special privilege of nosing around remote places, from Petra to Mesa Verde, without a plane to catch.

The idea behind this smart collection [— — ], edited by the anthropologist Brian Fagan, is that any number of visitors over the centuries to sites in the Middle East, Rome, Greece, China, Central Asia and Mexico have been in a broad sense archaeologists. Recorded accounts from any period, even if wrong-headed, form layers that can be profitably sifted.

The book excerpts dozens of restless and incongruous writers — Gustave Flaubert, Hiram Bingham, Mark Twain, Robert Byron and Rose Macaulay, and contemporary trekkers like Paul Theroux and Tom Bissell — so that we can compare their notes to near and faraway places.

For example, William Stukeley, the 18th-century English doctor and clergyman who promoted a theory of Stonehenge as home to a priestly caste of Druids, now qualifies as a kook. "Stonehenge has never fully recovered from the Reverend Stukeley's vision," remarks one modern-day scholar. And yet in his eagerness to mystify the meaning of the stones, Stukeley encapsulates the amateur spirit of the period. "He was one of many travellers of modest means who went in search of the past by simply riding out close to home," Mr. Fagan observes...

Looking down on other tourists is also a centuries-old pastime. Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, whose "Handbook for Travellers in Egypt" was published in 1847, wrote that "the travellers who go up the Nile will I fear soon be like Rhine tourists. & Cheapside will pour out its Legions upon Egypt..."

An Anthology of Archaeological Travel Writing, Richard B. Woodward, The New York Times, New York, USA, July 02, 2006.

‘Time is money’. Haven’t you heard this statement very often? From our childhood we are taught to value time and not to waste it carelessly. In today’s fast hi-tech life all our voluntary activities, from eating to sleeping, are performed minute-by-minute according to the clock. Today, it is unthinkable to function without our time-measuring machines.

It is interesting to find out how the measurement of time first began. We know that time was first split into day and night and finally into various units of time. The history of time-keeping is the story of the search for even more consistent actions to regulate the rate of a clock.

All clocks must have two basic components: a repetitive process to mark off equal increments of time. Early examples of such processes included movement of the sun and stars, increment marked candles, oil lamps with marked reservoirs, hourglasses and in the Orient, small stone mazes filled with incense that would burn at a certain pace.

These were means of keeping track of increments of time and displaying the result. Our means of keeping track of time include the position of clock hands and a digital time display. So, from huge ancient sun-dials to contemporary atomic clocks, here's something to interest you...

Measuring Time, Mukul Sharma, The Statesman, India, July 04, 2006.