|
|
|
Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years : Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
|
|
The Mummies of Urumchi
In the museums of Urumchi, the windswept regional capital of the Uyghur Autonomous Region (also known as Chinese Turkestan), a collection of ancient mummies lies at the center of an enormous mystery. Some of Urumchi's mummies date back as far as 4,000 years--contemporary with the famous Egyptian mummies but even more beautifully preserved. Surprisingly, these prehistoric people are not Asian but Caucasoid--tall, large-nosed and blond with thick beards and round eyes. What were these blond Caucasians doing in the heart of Asia? What language did they speak? Might they be related to a "lost tribe" known from later inscriptions? Few clues are offered by their pottery or tools, but their clothes--woolens that rarely survive more than a few centuries--have been preserved as brightly hued as the day they were woven. Elizabeth Wayland Barber describes these remarkable mummies and their clothing, and deduces their path to this remote, forbidding place. The result is a book like no other--a fascinating unveiling of an ancient, exotic, nearly forgotten world. A finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize..
Price: $11.93
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth
Why were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to rocks? What was the Golden Calf? Why are mirrors believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think that mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George actually fought dragons, since dragons don't exist? Strange though they sound, however, these "myths" did not begin as fiction. This absorbing book shows that myths originally transmitted real information about real events and observations, preserving the information sometimes for millennia within nonliterate societies. Geologists' interpretations of how a volcanic cataclysm long ago created Oregon's Crater Lake, for example, is echoed point for point in the local myth of its origin. The Klamath tribe saw it happen and passed down the story--for nearly 8,000 years. We, however, have been literate so long that we've forgotten how myths encode reality. Recent studies of how our brains work, applied to a wide range of data from the Pacific Northwest to ancient Egypt to modern stories reported in newspapers, have helped the Barbers deduce the characteristic principles by which such tales both develop and degrade through time. Myth is in fact a quite reasonable way to convey important messages orally over many generations--although reasoning back to the original events is possible only under rather specific conditions. Our oldest written records date to 5,200 years ago, but we have been speaking and mythmaking for perhaps 100,000. This groundbreaking book points the way to restoring some of that lost history and teaching us about human storytelling. .
Price: $12.65
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
History Stories for Children
|
|
The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved (New York Review Books Classics)
One spring morning two men cutting peat in a Danish bog uncovered a well-preserved body of a man with a noose around his neck. Thinking they had stumbled upon a murder victim, they reported their discovery to the police, who were baffled until they consulted the famous archaeologist P. V. Glob. He identified the body as that of a 2,000-year-old man, ritually murdered and thrown in the bog as a sacrifice to the goddess of fertility. A classic of archaeological history, originally conceived as a detective story of sorts, The Bog People is a fascinating account of the religion, culture, and daily life of Iron Age Europe..
Price: $9.30
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Nonviolent Communication: The Basics As I Know and Use Them
|
|
|
|
|
