Disclosing the Past

(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984) 0297785451. 8vo; original blue boards, lettered in gilt on spine; laminated pictorial dustwrapper; pp. 224, incl. index; plates; map. Dustwrapper sunned on spine panel; trace of spotting to edges and endpapers. Very good condition. "In the summer of 1935, during her first visit to East Africa, Mary Leakey, then just 22 years old, drove down the rocky flank of Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania and found herself gazing spellbound at a view that was to come to mean more to her than any other in the world. That view was the vast Serengeti Plain, 'stretching away to the horizon like the sea ... always the same, yet always different'. Perhaps that was the moment when Africa took its hold on her, for despite journeys to many parts of the world, the gullies and stream-beds, cliffs and hillsides of this ancient landscape were to be her home for nearly half a century. Here, with her husband Louis, and for many years after his death in 1972, she was to be involved in some of the most important and dramatic finds ever to shake the world of prehistoric archaeology." .