Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods PDF Download
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Author: David Lewis-Williams
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 050077045X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
An exploration of how brain structure and cultural content interacted in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago to produce unique life patterns and belief systems. What do the headless figures found in the famous paintings at Catalhoyuk in Turkey have in common with the monumental tombs at Newgrange and Knowth in Ireland? How can the concepts of "birth," "death," and "wild" cast light on the archaeological enigma of the domestication of cattle? What generated the revolutionary social change that ended the Upper Palaeolithic? David Lewis-Williams's previous book, The Mind in the Cave, dealt with the remarkable Upper Palaeolithic paintings, carvings, and engravings of western Europe. Here Dr. Lewis-Williams and David Pearce examine the intricate web of belief, myth, and society in the succeeding Neolithic period, arguably the most significant turning point in all human history, when agriculture became a way of life and the fractious society that we know today was born. The authors focus on two contrasting times and places: the beginnings in the Near East, with its mud-brick and stone houses each piled on top of the ruins of another, and western Europe, with its massive stone monuments more ancient than the Egyptian pyramids. They argue that neurological patterns hardwired into the brain help explain the art and society that Neolithic people produced. Drawing on the latest research, the authors skillfully link material on human consciousness, imagery, and religious concepts to propose provocative new theories about the causes of an ancient revolution in cosmology and the origins of social complexity. In doing so they create a fascinating neurological bridge to the mysterious thought-lives of the past and reveal the essence of a momentous period in human history. 100 illustrations, 20 in color.
Author: David Lewis-Williams
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 050077045X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355
Get Book Here
Book Description
An exploration of how brain structure and cultural content interacted in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago to produce unique life patterns and belief systems. What do the headless figures found in the famous paintings at Catalhoyuk in Turkey have in common with the monumental tombs at Newgrange and Knowth in Ireland? How can the concepts of "birth," "death," and "wild" cast light on the archaeological enigma of the domestication of cattle? What generated the revolutionary social change that ended the Upper Palaeolithic? David Lewis-Williams's previous book, The Mind in the Cave, dealt with the remarkable Upper Palaeolithic paintings, carvings, and engravings of western Europe. Here Dr. Lewis-Williams and David Pearce examine the intricate web of belief, myth, and society in the succeeding Neolithic period, arguably the most significant turning point in all human history, when agriculture became a way of life and the fractious society that we know today was born. The authors focus on two contrasting times and places: the beginnings in the Near East, with its mud-brick and stone houses each piled on top of the ruins of another, and western Europe, with its massive stone monuments more ancient than the Egyptian pyramids. They argue that neurological patterns hardwired into the brain help explain the art and society that Neolithic people produced. Drawing on the latest research, the authors skillfully link material on human consciousness, imagery, and religious concepts to propose provocative new theories about the causes of an ancient revolution in cosmology and the origins of social complexity. In doing so they create a fascinating neurological bridge to the mysterious thought-lives of the past and reveal the essence of a momentous period in human history. 100 illustrations, 20 in color.
Author: J. David Lewis-Williams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antiquities, Prehistoric
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: Tamora Pierce
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439132097
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
During a dire battle against the fearsome Skinners, Daine and her mage teacher Numair are swept into the Divine Realms. Though happy to be alive, they are not where they want to be. They are desperately needed back home, where their old enemy, Ozorne, and his army of strange creatures are waging war against Tortall. Trapped in the mystical realms Daine discovers her mysterious parentage. And as these secrets of her past are revealed so is the treacherous way back to Tortall. So they embark on an extraordinary journey home, where the fate of all Tortall rests with Daine and her wild magic.
Author: David Lewis-Williams
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500770468
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Goes to the heart of contemporary arguments about the "primitive" and the "modern" minds, and draws new social, anthropological, and ethnographic conclusions about the nature of ancient societies. How did ancient peoples—those living before written records—think? Were their thinking patterns fundamentally different from ours today? Researchers over the years have certainly believed so. Along with the Aborigines of Australia, the indigenous San people of southern Africa—among the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth—became iconic representatives of all our distant ancestors and were viewed as either irrational fantasists or childlike, highly spiritual conservationists. Since the 1960s a new wave of research among the San and their world-famous rock art has overturned these misconceived ideas. Here, the great authority David Lewis-Williams and his colleague Sam Challis reveal how analysis of the rock paintings and engravings can be made to yield vital insights into San beliefs and ways of thought. This is possible because we possess comprehensive transcriptions, made in the nineteenth century, of interviews with San informants who were shown copies of the art and gave their interpretations of it. Using the analogy of the Rosetta Stone, the authors move back and forth between these San texts and the rock art, teasing out the subtle meanings behind both. The picture that emerges is very different from past analysis: this art is not a naive narrative of daily life but rather is imbued with power and religious depth.
Author: Dimitra Papagianni
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500771804
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
“Even-handed, up-to-date, and clearly written. . . . If you want to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of Neanderthal controversies, you’ll find no better guide.” —Brian Fagan, author of Cro-Magnon In recent years, the common perception of the Neanderthal has been transformed thanks to new discoveries and paradigm-shattering scientific innovations. It turns out that the Neanderthals’ behavior was surprisingly modern: they buried the dead, cared for the sick, hunted large animals in their prime, harvested seafood, and spoke. Meanwhile, advances in DNA technologies have forced a reassessment of the Neanderthals’ place in our own past. For hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals evolved in Europe very much in parallel to the Homo sapiens line evolving in Africa, and, when both species made their first forays into Asia, the Neanderthals may even have had the upper hand. Here, Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse look at the Neanderthals through the full dramatic arc of their existence—from their evolution in Europe to their expansion to Siberia, their subsequent extinction, and ultimately their revival in popular novels, cartoons, cult movies, and TV commercials.
Author: David Lewis-Williams
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500770433
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
A controversial exploration of the origin of religion in the neurology of the human brain. In this book the noted cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams confronts a question that troubles many people in the world today: Is there a supernatural realm that intervenes in the material world of daily life and leads to the evolution of religions? Professor Lewis-Williams first describes how science developed within the cocoon of religion and then shows how the natural functioning of the human brain creates experiences that can lead to belief in a supernatural realm, beings, and interventions. Once people have these experiences, they formulate beliefs about them, and thus creeds are born. Forty thousand years ago, people were leaving traces in the archaeological record of activities that we can label religious, and Lewis-Williams discusses in detail the evidence preserved in the Volp Caves in France. He also shows that mental imagery produced by the functioning of the human brain can be detected in widely separated religious communities such as Hildegard of Bingen’s in medieval Europe or the San hunters of southern Africa.
Author: David Lewis-Williams
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500770301
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
The art created in the caves of western Europe in the Ice Age provokes awe and wonder. What do these symbols on the walls of Lascaux and Altamira, tell us about the nature of ancestral minds? How did these images spring into the human story? This book, a masterful piece of detective work, puts forward the most plausible explanation yet.
Author: J.D. Lewis-Williams
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821444581
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 159
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Book Description
San rock paintings, scattered over the range of southern Africa, are considered by many to be the very earliest examples of representational art. There are as many as 15,000 known rock art sites, created over the course of thousands of years up until the nineteenth century. There are possibly just as many still awaiting discovery. Taking as his starting point the magnificent Linton panel in the Iziko-South African Museum in Cape Town, J. D. Lewis-Williams examines the artistic and cultural significance of rock art and how this art sheds light on how San image-makers conceived their world. It also details the European encounter with rock art as well as the contentious European interaction with the artists’ descendants, the contemporary San people.
Author: Ian Hodder
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107047331
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403
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Book Description
A unique collaboration between archaeologists and a range of specialists in ritual and religion, looking at the role of religion in early human societies.
Author: Robert E. Wood
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
ISBN: 0813231175
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
Robert Wood’s aim in Being and the Cosmos\i is to reestablish a speculative view of the cosmos that goes back to the ancient Greeks and that corresponds to the holism of contemporary physics. There are two sets of problems in contemporary thought that militate against any such attempt. Most widespread is scientific reductionism in biology and neuroscience that explains awareness in terms of the mechanisms that underlie it. The second is the widespread attack in philosophy itself on speculative holism by deconstruction and anti-foundationalism. In Being and the Cosmos\i, the tack against both is to make explicit the character of the mind that sees and thinks, that actively takes up commitment to the truth available in the disciplines involved. The basic ground of this position rests upon the functioning of the notion of Being that opens up the question of the character of the Whole and the human being’s place in it. Thus position the treatment of the notion of Being as foundation and as orientation toward the Whole between the attack on reductionism and on deconstruction and anti-foundationalism. Wood concludes with a multidimensional sketch of an evolutionary view of the cosmos whose initial phases contain the potentialities for life, sensibility, and intellect as cosmic telos. The holism of contemporary physics has to be reconfigured in terms of this observation. Both reductionists and dualists should know that matter itself has to be re-minded and that mind itself matters.
