<i>Granted, but isn't that a matter of scale? Surely you would need a stable, sustainable and above all - SURPLUS population before non essential ritual structures like temples could be built. </i>

The premise of the book is that religions/cults etc are essential pats of the human psyche, to reconcile the universal internal experiences in the mind of the spiritual/mystic/supernatural. The experiences common to the human mind cause practices to encourage/discourage/celebrate/explore/all the above, the practices then lead to beliefs and the beliefs lead to the creation of the cult structures. Take more recently the Irish famine, people unable to feed themselves yet religion took feverent hold over the country. If thats a basic part of the human condition then perhaps these temples were above everything else essential for the fate of the community.

<i>By surplus population, I mean sufficient people over and above the economic requirement to sustain the life of the community at subsistence level. That would be true even if the workforce was slave labour. That surplus food production would require the evolution of successful, productive farming before temple construction.</i>

Why before? If they lived happily in large settlements before farming was a necessity, what triggered the labour intensive farming practices? The building of massive structures that would tie up a portion of the hunting/gathering group? The books argument is that the large populations were there already and they had cults as found with the skulls from the mesolithic before 9,000bc which had plastered 'faces' on them and sea-shell eyes inserted, these were kept below the floors of mesolithic houses. The temple at Gobelki Tepe did not have housing nearby, they contend therefore that the gathering of grain brought to this site led indirectly to domesticated strains due to the 'cream of the crop' being gathered the waste of which developed over time into domesticated strains.

<i>That's it! Avebury was a gigantic slave labour camp. The ditches and huge stones kept them in and they were marched off every morning to work on Silbury Hill. Ditto Durrington - a labour camp for Stonehenge the Cursus and all the extravagant and impractical ritual monuments.</i>

I know its tongue in cheek but there's no reason to suppose the labour was forced, in fact it is more likely to be just the opposite.