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A Telegraph Book of the Year A remarkable, unprecedented account of the role of magic in cultures both ancient and modern -- from the first known horoscope to the power of tattoos. 'Fascinating, original, excellent' Simon Sebag Montefiore ______________________ Three great strands of practice and belief run through human history: science, religion and magic. But magic - the idea that we have a connection with the universe - has developed a bad reputation. It has been with us for millennia - from the curses and charms of ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish magic, to the shamanistic traditions of Eurasia, indigenous America and Africa, and even today in the West when snapping wishbones or buying l...
Recent archaeological discoveries from China and central Asia have changed our understanding of how human civilization developed in the period of some 4 million years before the start of written history. In this new edition of his Very Short Introduction, Chris Gosden explores the current theories on the ebb and flow of human cultural variety.
Publisher Description
Prehistory covers the period of some 4 million years before the start of written history, when our earliest ancestors, the Australopithecines, existed in Africa. But this is relatively recent compared to whole history of the earth of some 4.5 billion years. A key aspect of prehistory is that it provides a sense of scale, throwing recent ways of life into perspective. Humans and their ancestors lived in many different ways and the cultural variety we see now is just a tiny fraction of that which has existed over millions of years. Humans are part of the broader evolution of landscapes and communities of plants and animals, but Homo sapiens is also the only species to have made a real impact o...
The nature of time is one of the continuing mysteries of human life. This is of particular relevance to archaeology with its unique focus on the social development of the human species from its origins to the present. Christopher Gosden probes the way in which the rhythms of social life derive from our involvement in the world, particularly as those rhythms unfold over many thousands of years. The author argues that time is created through the social use of material things such as landscapes, settlements and monuments, and illustrates this with case studies drawn from Europe and the Pacific. The book provides a theory of social change and social being as the basis for understanding social formations over long periods of time. In developing this theory the author surveys ideas on human action and time as these have evolved over the last two centuries. Although the theory is designed and presented here to be of practical use in interpreting archaeological data - exemplified here in case studies - the broad scope of the book will ensure its interest to all concerned with the interactions between people and the material world.
"The project on which the book was based synthesized all the major available sources of information on English archaeology for the period from 1500 BC to AD 1086, providing an overview of the history of the English landscape from the Bronze Age to the Norman invasion. The result is the first account of the English landscape over a crucial 2500-year period when people created many of the features still visible today. It also provides a celebration of many centuries of archaeological work, especially the intensive investigations that have taken place since the 1960s, when frequent large-scale work has transformed our understanding of England's past"--Publisher's description.
An atlas of English archaeology covering the period from the middle Bronze Age (c. 1500 BC) to Domesday Book (AD 1086), encompassing the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Roman period, and the early medieval (Anglo-Saxon) age.
The Prehistory of Food sets subsistence in its social context by focusing on food as a cultural artefact. It brings together contributors with a scientific and biological expertise as well as those interested in the patterns of consumption and social change, and includes a wide range of case studies.
Anthropologists of the senses have long argued that cultures differ in their sensory registers. This groundbreaking volume applies this idea to material culture and the social practices that endow objects with meanings in both colonial and postcolonial relationships. It challenges the privileged position of the sense of vision in the analysis of material culture. Contributors argue that vision can only be understood in relation to the other senses. In this they present another challenge to the assumed western five-sense model, and show how our understanding of material culture in both historical and contemporary contexts might be reconfigured if we consider the role of smell, taste, touch and sound, as well as sight, in making meanings about objects.
The new benchmark volume on Celtic Art in Europe.