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Re: Ritual
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> A pretty good example of an attempt to scientifically apply ethnology to archaeology is David Lewis-Williams' "The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art."

Definitely one of the best places to start. He's a little too staunchly rationalist for my taste, and I've never thought that staunch rationalists were the best people to really get under the skin of folk who crawled into mountains to paint animals ;-) However, within the confines of the academy, Lewis-Williams does a great job of being open-minded.

I loved his intro, where he depicts a sequence of human encounters with these painted caves, each from a different epoch, to illustrate the evolution of our relationship to them. It's the thing that brought home to me most vividly what a complete and utter traumatic shock the implications of Darwinian evolution must have been for the 19th century. Specifically, the true depth of our past, in contrast the that quaint Bishop Ussher-stylee Christian view of it stretching back all of 6000 or so years.

His earlier book, right at the roots of the recent wave of "ethnoarchaeology", 'Believing and seeing', is probably out of date in some respects now, but is a beautiful piece of writing, well worth getting hold of if you can.


Reply | with quote		Posted by gyrus
15th January 2006ce
13:24

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