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Excavating the Mind deals with the relationship between the material culture of humans, i.e. our technologies, arts and environments, and our mental worlds. Emphasizing the close interdependence of mind and matter, the volume resonates with current developments within sociology, psychology and the cognitive sciences, yet it aims to supplement the focus on modern, predominantly Western societies and individuals with studies of different cultural contexts and processes in the evolutionary and historical past as well as the ethnographic present. With contributions from cognitive and social archaeology as well as anthropology, semiotics and the history of religion, the book combines well-illustrated case studies covering a wide chronological and geographic span - from Neolithic Europe to the present-day South Pacific - with incisive discussion of particular theoretical issues in the study of mind and material culture. Excavating the Mind is an original contribution to the multidisciplinary debate on the uniquely human entanglement of complex material cultures and mental worlds.
An account of the different ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body, from prehistory to the present. An increasingly influential school of thought in cognitive science views the mind as embodied, extended, and distributed rather than brain-bound or “all in the head.” This shift in perspective raises important questions about the relationship between cognition and material culture, posing major challenges for philosophy, cognitive science, archaeology, and anthropology. In How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris proposes a cross-disciplinary analytical framework for investigating the ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human b...
The Saturated Sensorium is a book about the senses and their media in the Middle Ages: a book about what it meant to sense and perceive something. The book highlights the integrated and unified nature of medieval senses and media. It discusses the inter- and multi-mediality of cultic and cultural artefacts as well as the sensorial and inter-sensorial dimensions of a wide array of cultural concepts and practices within medieval religion, art, archaeology, architecture, literature, music, food, social life, ritual, devotion, cognition, and memory. These domains of sensory and media history are dealt with, not as isolated anthology articles in only loose connection with one another, but as coor...
This book is the first to apply systematic palaeopathological, archaeological and historical investigations (using bones as a focus as well as other supporting lines of information) to Chinese osteological materials in order to answer the question about the origins of cattle labour. Structurally, this monograph flows from an introduction and review of previous scholarship and questions, through employed theory and developed methods, to analyses of archaeological materials, and finally finishes by overall discussion and closing remarks. Topics covered in this monograph include the significance of the study of cattle traction in North China, understanding and research into cattle traction within history, art and archaeology, and identifying traction in cattle bones. The author also uses the Pathological Index-refined (PIr) and morphometrics to test the reliability of both methods in identifying traction in cattle bones. The author applies both methods to archaeological sites in the Yellow River region. This book is of interest to researchers studying the Late Bronze Age and zooarchaeology.
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Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.
In recent years, the world has been shaken by numerous events that have caused and continue to cause massive human suffering, from the COVID-19 pandemic to intrastate and interstate armed conflicts. Moreover, climate change continues to plow ahead, contributing to growing tensions, population movements, and resource scarcity. Meanwhile, the methods by which groups and group life are threatened, and the means by which violence is incited and perpetrated, continue to evolve. Such divergent crises, even when they overlap or intersect, confound definition and label. This book seeks not to answer the question "What is genocide?" but rather "What is genocide studies?" When Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide" in 1944, he could not have foreseen what the world would look like today. Now is the time to think about current manifestations of genocide and those likely to emerge in the future.
Extraterrestrial Altruism examines a basic assumption of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI): that extraterrestrials will be transmitting messages to us for our benefit. This question of whether extraterrestrials will be altruistic has become increasingly important in recent years as SETI scientists have begun contemplating transmissions from Earth to make contact. Technological civilizations that transmit signals for the benefit of others, but with no immediate gain for themselves, certainly seem to be altruistic. But does this make biological sense? Should we expect altruism to evolve throughout the cosmos, or is this only wishful thinking? Is it dangerous to send messages ...
This book reorients the study of sacrifice, examining the locus of ritual action - the altars of Republican Rome and Latium.
After his Arab homeland is devastated by American bombs and missiles, Colonel Zin Bel-el-bey Gabbiya offers himself as a target in a bizarre plot to bring the American Satan to its knees. Only Pete Casey, ex-Vietnam pilot stands between the Middle Eastern madman and global chaos.