How did prehistoric peoples those living before written records think? Were their modes of thought fundamentally different from ours today? Researchers over the years have certainly believed so. Along with the Aborigines of Australia, the indigenous San people of southern Africa among the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth became iconic representatives of all our distant ancestors, and were viewed either as irrational fantasists or childlike, highly spiritual conservationists. Since t...

Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures.In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true lost civilization, the...

A four-time Governor General’s-award nominee for both poetry and non-fiction, Christopher Dewdney is celebrated internationally as a writer and a visionary and is best known for his particular imagining of place and memory. Beginning with Paleozoic fossil formations in southwestern Ontario and moving through eons of natural history to cityscapes and the digital present, Dewdney’s poetics encapsulate often surreal experiences from radical and epiphenomenal perspectives. His writing vibrates...

The art created in the caves of western Europe in the Ice Age provokes awe and wonder. What do these symbols on the walls of Lascaux and Altamira, tell us about the nature of ancestral minds? How did these images spring into the human story? This book, a masterful piece of detective work, puts forward the most plausible explanation yet.

It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. The phenomenon known as language death has started to accelerate as the world has grown smaller. This extinction of languages, and the knowledge therein, has no parallel in human history. K. David Harrison's book is the first to focus on the essential question, what is lost when a language dies? What forms of knowledge are embedded in ...

The fastest animal alive, the falcon deserves attention not just for the combination of speed, power, beauty and ferocity that have made it an object of fascination for thousands of years, but for the light it sheds on the cultures through which it has flown. This book, bridging science and cultural history, surveys the practical and symbolic uses of falcons in human culture in new and exciting ways.Helen Macdonald describes the complete history of the bird, ranging across the glob...

Part travelogue and part scientist's notebook, The Last Speakers is the poignant chronicle of author K. David Harrison's expeditions around the world to meet with last speakers of vanishing languages. The speakers' eloquent reflections and candid photographs reveal little-known lifeways as well as revitalization efforts to teach disappearing languages to younger generations. Thought-provoking and engaging, this unique book illuminates the global language-extinction crisis through photos, g...

Everything about hunting leads inexorably to death; the challenge for all hunters is how to justify the kill. But the hunters emotional response to the kill is immensely complex. Hunters respectand even lovethe animals they kill. Talking to the Shaman Within: Musings on Hunting addresses this paradox head-on, dissecting the emotional and psychological response of the hunter to his quarry and, more broadly, his surroundings. The climax of the chase brings the hunter closer to realizing the ...

The next century will see more than half of the world’s 6,000 languages become extinct, and most of these will disappear without being adequately recorded. Written by one of the leading figures in language documentation, this fascinating book explores what humanity stands to lose as a result.Explores the unique philosophy, knowledge, and cultural assumptions of languages, and their impact on our collective intellectual heritageQuestions why such linguistic diversity...

Balinese Art is the first comprehensive survey of Balinese painting from its origins in the traditional Balinese village to its present position at the forefront of the high-priced Asian art scene.Balinese art has been popular and widely collected around the world for many decades. In fact, the contemporary painter who commands the highest prices in Southeast Asia's hot art market is Bali-born Nyoman Masriadi (1973-). This book demonstrates that his work d...

Set in the long-lost City of Victoria (a fictional world similar to Hong Kong), Atlas is written from the unified perspective of future archaeologists struggling to rebuild a thrilling metropolis. Divided into four sections—"Theory," "The City," "Streets," and "Signs"—the novel reimagines Victoria through maps and other historical documents and artifacts, mixing real-world scenarios with purely imaginary people and events while incorporating anecdotes and actual and fictional soci...

Paul G. Bahn provides a richly illustrated overview of prehistoric rock art and cave art from around the world. Summarizing the recent advances in our understanding of this extraordinary visual record, he discusses new discoveries, new approaches to recording and interpretation, and current problems in conservation. Bahn focuses in particular on current issues in the interpretation of rock art, notably the 'shamanic' interpretation that has been influential in recent years and that he refu...