A passionate, attentive visual, anthropological and economic survey across the world, in search of images that become visual archaeology. The book unfolds in thematic paths that guide the reader through different aspects of human labour, telling the stories of people, men, women and children, through everyday gestures that become episodes of a silent, painful epic. "In its forward rush the highly industrialised world marches at a forced pace and has already mortgaged what until recently seemed to belong only to a distant future. These pictures hold the history of an era. The photographs are the visual archaeology of a time known to history as the industrial revolution, an age in which men and women, with their manual labour, held the axis of the world in their hands" (Sebastião Salgado).