BROUGHT TO BOOK: Artifacts (An Archaeologist's Year In Silicon Valley) By Christine A. Finn The MIT Press £16.95 (UK) What on earth is an archaeologist doing in Silicon Valley - looking for some Gates deity of yore or evidence of an ancient computer civilisation? The answer is looking behind the rollercoaster that is the Valley, and talking to the people who live there - even those who don't work in the tech sector.

Christine Finn is an archaeologist as foreign correspondent, something like a techie Dervla Murphy.

José used to pick cherries but now recycles silicon chips, Thelma beats factory wages by babysitting the kids of a post-IPO couple, and Bob looks forward to retirement elsewhere after selling his mobile home to incoming geeks.

Everybody knows you can earn big bucks in the Valley, but true romance is a precarious business. Steve tells the story of spending $2,000 on emeralds as a birthday present, then getting a call to say the woman couldn't make it. It's also hard to get a man.

There isn't much time out in Silicon Valley and the only way to survive in this cauldron is to know exactly what you are doing there.

The dot.bomb phenomenon saw the birth of Startupfailures.com - or "the place for bouncing back" - which is a forum for those who have fallen from the sky, like Icarus. Its founder was involved in three start-up failures, which he says can be tougher than the failure of a marriage.

Someone asked how could they sell their six-person office furniture locally on the Startupfailures discussion board. One response was: sell it to another start-up. Surely this type of frontier pragmatism would have done John Wayne proud.

Artifacts is replete with insight, humour and learning, and is a beautifully produced volume.

Finn gets behind the visible landscape of the place that went from orchards to Apples - salaries, successes and failures - and presents a three-dimensional picture of past and present.

Notwithstanding the irony of an archaeologist excavating a community that epitomises the times we live in, the result is a challenging but rewarding book, with a difference.

Written before the travails of the last year when the latter-day pioneers found there was no crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, Finn felt like she had witnessed the rise and fall of the Roman empire in 12 months. A friend corrected her by pointing out that the past five years had been unusual for the Valley - which had always been built of more than just the dot.coms.

John Mulqueen

jmulqueen@irish-times.ie