Letter: A wealth of words on Africa's ancient past

Sir: Your archaeology correspondent, David Keys, cannot be allowed to get away with the suggestion that Black Africa's pre-colonial past has been ignored by British publishers. Leaving aside specialised monographs (including, for example, Ivor Wilks's classics on Ashanti, or the five-volume report on Olduvai Gorge, under the general editorship of Louis and Mary Leakey and Phillip Tobias), Cambridge University Press alone has published a series of successful books, accessible to the general reader, that Mr Keys should be made aware of.

David Phillipson's African Archaeology, first published in 1986, has just been brought up to date. There is the eight-volume Cambridge History of Africa; Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore's The African Middle Ages; Roland Oliver and Brian Fagan's Africa in the Iron Age c 500 BC to AD 1400; Graham Connah's African Civilizations and Three Thousand Years in Africa, Bruce Trigger et al's Ancient Egypt, and more.

Yours faithfully,

JESSICA KUPER

Senior Editor

Cambridge University Press

Cambridge

6 July