Interesting, I will order the book once I've finished Colin Renfrew's new book "Prehistory of the Mind" which I thought would deal with the same kinds of things but 3/4 way through (and it's pretty slim at that) he's still talking about traditional and new models of archaeological analysis and precious little about the minds of the guys in the ground. I've got too many new books un-opened already so I'm just buying one after finishing the last.

I've been thinking about these themes for the last couple of years and am coming to the conclusion that the ancient mind (at least for the last 30,000 years or so) was pretty much the same as ours, give or take. Shamanistic, animistic and other supernatural beliefs systems seem to me to confirm this rather than contradict it since to have a concept of 'supernatural' you must have a basic framework of 'natural', a world that obeys natural laws and concepts based in experience and experiment rather than imagination.

In other words, why would spirits be anything out of the ordinary unless they broke an intuitive concept of death being the end of life, or physical laws like objects being solid and impentrable? Animisitc beliefs would be unexceptional unless we have an intuitive natural history that categorises people having minds/souls but animals and plants being without. You rarely see belief systems or religions that conform strictly to a kind of intuitive natural law, they seem by definition to imagine a world where the everyday natural order is broken down or compromised, which implies the presence of a basic worldview of what we would call 'common sense' that beliefs and religions contradict.