It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of our time, identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium BCE), when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. These religious prophets and renouncers never succeeded in founding their alternative utopias, but they left a heritage of criticism that would not be quenched.Bellah's treatment of the four great civilizations of the Axial Age--in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India--shows all existing religions, both prophetic and mystic, to be rooted in the evolutionary story he tells. Religion in Human Evolution answers the call for a critical history of religion grounded in the full range of human constraints and possibilities.

    In this pioneering study West documents that: Hieroglyphs carry hermetic messages that convey the subtler realities of the Sacred Science of the Pharaohs. Egyptian science, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy were more sophisticated than most modern Egyptologists acknowledge. Egyptian knowledge of the universe was a legacy from a highly sophisticated civilization that flourished thousands of years ago. The great Sphinx represents geological proof that such a civilization existed. This revised edition includes a new introduction linking Egyptian spiritual science with the perennial wisdom tradition and an appendix updating West's work in redating the Sphinx. Illustrated with over 140 photographs and line drawings.

    Claiming that science has created a largely fictional scenario for American Indians in prehistoric North America, Deloria offers an alternative view of the continent's history as seen through the eyes and memories of Native Americans. Further, he warns future generations of scientists not to repeat the ethnocentric omissions and fallacies of the past by dismissing Native oral tradition as mere legends.

    This comprehensive survey of Egyptian society and history transforms our understanding of this remarkable civilisation.

    But civilization, Wengrow argues, is not exclusively about large-scale settlements and endeavors. Just as important are the ordinary but fundamental practices of everyday life, such as cooking, running a home, and cleaning the body. Tracing the development of such practices, from prehistoric times to the age of the pyramids, Wengrow reveals unsuspected connections between distant regions and provides new insights into the workings of societies we have come to regard as remote from our own. The book obliges us to recognize that civilizations are not formed in isolation, but through the mixing and borrowing of culture between different societies. It concludes by drawing telling parallels between the ancient Near East and more contemporary attempts to reshape the world according to an ideal image.CONTENTS:Chronology chart Introduction: A Clash of Civilizations?PART I The Cauldron of Civilization Camouflaged Borrowings On the Trail of Blue-Haired GodsNeolithic Worlds The (First) Global VillageOrigin of Cities From the Ganges to the Danube: the Bronze AgeCosmology and CommerceThe Labours of KingshipPART II Forgetting the Old RegimeEnlightenment from a Dark SourceRuined Regimes: Egypt at the RevolutionConclusion: What Makes Civilization?

    His aim is to account for the evolution of cultural forms as Darwin accounted for the evolution of biological forms: to show how cultures adopt their characteristic forms in response to changing ecological modes."[A] magisterial interpretation of the rise and fall of human cultures and societies."-- Robert Lekachman, Washington Post Book World"Its persuasive arguments asserting the primacy of cultural rather than genetic or psychological factors in human life deserve the widest possible audience."-- Gloria Levitas The New Leader"[An] original and...urgent theory about the nature of man and at the reason that human cultures take so many diverse shapes."-- The New Yorker"Lively and controversial."-- I. Bernard Cohen, front page, The New York Times Book Review

    He draws on interviews with some of the world’s highest performing researchers, the literature and his own experience to identify a small number of important insights that can transform how researchers work. The book is based on an unparalleled breadth of interdisciplinary evidence that speaks directly to researchers of all disciplines and career stages. The lessons in this book will make you more productive, more satisfied with what you produce, and enable you to be happy working less, and being more. The hardback edition has the title and design imprinted on a fabric cover, hand crafted by a book maker in Yorkshire. It contains spectacular colour photography throughout. Chapters are accompanied by close-up images of trees that build up to the forest metaphor that concludes the book. These are bookended by wide perspective canopy images that accompany the front matter (from which the cover design is derived) and concluding chapter. The overall effect is a touch and feel that makes this a book to savour. Mark Reed is Professor of Socio-Technical Innovation at Newcastle University and Visiting Professor at Birmingham City University and the University of Leeds. He has over 140 publications that have been cited more than 10,000 times. He is author of The Research Impact Handbook, which he has used to train over 4000 researchers from more than 200 institutions in 55 countries.

    In a time when ladies dressed in ruffled petticoats, these women were sporting work trousers, smoking men's pipes, and riding camels through uncharted Middle Eastern deserts. They were adventurous, smart, and fearless—they were the first women archaeologists. What drew these pioneering ladies into a male-dominated field that was then a very young science? What drove them to travel to far-flung sites where the well water was filled with bugs, danger was daily, and the sun was so hot it could bake through leather boots? Each woman found archaeology to be an irresistible passion. And as they pursued their dreams, they helped to bury ideas about feminine nature as something intrinsically soft and submissive. Ladies of the Field excavates the stories of women who sought adventure in the burgeoning new field of archaelogy and who continue to inspire us today, including Amelia Edwards, Jane Dieulafoy, Zelia Nuttall, Gertrude Bell, Harriet Boyd-Hawes, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Garrod.

    Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far from their centers of power. Europeans were often more dependent on Indians than Indians were on them.Now the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, this native ground was originally populated by indigenous peoples, became part of the French and Spanish empires, and in 1803 was bought by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Drawing on archaeology and oral history, as well as documents in English, French, and Spanish, DuVal chronicles the successive migrations of Indians and Europeans to the area from precolonial times through the 1820s. These myriad native groups--Mississippians, Quapaws, Osages, Chickasaws, Caddos, and Cherokees--and the waves of Europeans all competed with one another for control of the region.Only in the nineteenth century did outsiders initiate a future in which one people would claim exclusive ownership of the mid-continent. After the War of 1812, these settlers came in numbers large enough to overwhelm the region's inhabitants and reject the early patterns of cross-cultural interdependence. As citizens of the United States, they persuaded the federal government to muster its resources on behalf of their dreams of landholding and citizenship.With keen insight and broad vision, Kathleen DuVal retells the story of Indian and European contact in a more complex and, ultimately, more satisfactory way.

    Topics range from expressive hand gestures to patron saints, pasta, parmesan, shoes, opera, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, gelato, gondolas, and more. History, folklore, superstitions, traditions, and customs are tossed in a delicious sauce that also includes a wealth of factual information for the sophisticated traveler:• why lines, as we know them, are nonexistent in Italy• why a string of coral beads is often seen around a baby’s wrist• what the unlucky number of Italy is (it’s not thirteen, unless seating guests at a table, when it IS thirteen–taking into account the outcome of the Last Supper)• why red underwear begins to appear in shops as the New Year approaches In addition to the lyrical and poetic, Italianissimo provides useful and indispensable information for the traveler: deciphering the quirks of the language (while English has only one word for “you,†in Italy there are three), the best place to find balsamic vinegar (in Modena, of course), the best gelato (in Sicily, where they first invented it using the snow from Mount Etna). There are also recommendations for little-known museums and destinations (the Bodoni museum, the Pinocchio park, legendary coffee bars).This is a new kind of guidebook overflowing with enlightening and hilarious miscellaneous information, filled with luscious graphics and unforgettable photographs that will decode and enrich all trips to Italy–both real and imaginary.

    Biers wrote The Archaeology of Greece to introduce students, teachers, and lay readers to the delights of exploring the world of ancient Greece. The great popularity of the first edition testifies to his success.In his preface to the second edition, Biers points out that, while the field of Greek archaeology may seem conservative and slow-moving, it has undergone major changes, especially in regard to work on the Bronze Age. The revised edition brings information on all areas up to date, reflecting the most recent research, and it includes cross references to Perseus II, the interactive electronic data base on Archaic and Classical Greece. This edition includes new illustrations, some of recent finds, some of improved plans, and others added to enhance an explanation or to illustrate a point.

    It offers a battery of methods that can be used to help us understand human behavior. Nevertheless, the legitimacy of this exercise is at the center of a heated controversy that has raged for over a century. Many evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and psychologists have taken these evolutionary principles and tried using them to explain a wide range of human characteristics, such as homicide, religion and sex differences in behavior. Others, however, are sceptical of these interpretations. Moreover, researchers disagree as to the best ways to use evolution to explore humanity, and a number of schools have emerged. Sense and Nonsense provides an introduction to the ideas, methods, and findings of five such schools, namely, sociobiology, human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, memetics, and gene-culture co-evolution. Carefully guiding the reader through the mire of confusing terminology, claim and counter-claim, and polemical statements, Laland and Brown provide a balanced, rigorous analysis that scrutinizes both the evolutionary arguments and the allegations of the critics. This is a book that will be make fascinating reading for popular science readers, undergraduate and postgraduate students (for example, in psychology, anthropology and zoology), and to experts on one approach who would like to know more about the other perspectives. Having completed this book the reader will feel better placed to assess the legitimacy of claims made about human behavior under the name of evolution, and to make judgements as to what is sense and what is nonsense.

    Marija Gimbutas wrote and taught with rare clarity in her original—and originally shocking—interpretation of prehistoric European civilization. Gimbutas flew in the face of contemporary archaeology when she reconstructed goddess-centered cultures that predated historic patriarchal cultures by many thousands of years.This volume, which was close to completion at the time of her death, contains the distillation of her studies, combined with new discoveries, insights, and analysis. Editor Miriam Robbins Dexter has added introductory and concluding remarks, summaries, and annotations. The first part of the book is an accessible, beautifully illustrated summation of all Gimbutas's earlier work on "Old European" religion, together with her ideas on the roles of males and females in ancient matrilineal cultures. The second part of the book brings her knowledge to bear on what we know of the goddesses today—those who, in many places and in many forms, live on.

    They wonder:How could it be fair to punish anyone for eternity?Will Jesus really condemn millions simply for not believing the right things about him? Isn’t God a God of love, not vengeance?The top-notch contributors to Is Hell for Real or Does Everyone Go to Heaven? tackle these and other questions with an even-handed survey of the Bible’s teaching on this difficult subject. Together, they present a careful case for upholding hell, showing that it remains central to a right understanding of God, the gospel, humanity, and God’s purposes for the world.Useful for group discussion or individual study, Is Hell for Real or Does Everyone Go to Heaven? provides an accessible introduction to the historic Christian doctrine of hell.

    In myth and image, in visionary experience and ritual representation, the Greeks possessed a complete expression of indestructible life, the essence of Dionysos. In this work, the noted mythologist and historian of religion Carl Kerenyi presents a historical account of the religion of Dionysos from its beginnings in the Minoan culture down to its transition to a cosmic and cosmopolitan religion of late antiquity under the Roman Empire. From the wealth of Greek literary, epigraphic, and monumental traditions, Kerenyi constructs a picture of Dionysian worship, always underlining the constitutive element of myth.Included in this study are the secret cult scenes of the women's mysteries both within and beyond Attica, the mystic sacrificial rite at Delphi, and the great public Dionysian festivals at Athens. The way in which the Athenian people received and assimilated tragedy in its immanent connection with Dionysos is seen as the greatest miracle in all cultural history. Tragedy and New Comedy are seen as high spiritual forms of the Dionysian religion, and the Dionysian element itself is seen as a chapter in the religious history of Europe.