A Telegraph Book of the YearA remarkable, unprecedented account of the role of magic in cultures both ancient and modern -- from the first known horoscope to the power of tattoos.'Fascinating, original, excellent' Simon Sebag Montefiore______________________Three great strands of practice and belief run through human history: science, religion and ma...

Prehistory covers the period of some 4 million years before the start of written history, when our earliest ancestors, the Australopithecines, existed in Africa. But this is relatively recent compared to whole history of the earth of some 4.5 billion years. A key aspect of prehistory is that it provides a sense of scale, throwing recent ways of life into perspective. Humans and their ancestors lived in many different ways and the cultural variety we see now is just a tiny fraction of that ...

Magic: Unveiling the Enduring Power of an Ancient Art in Human HistoryIn Magic: A History, Oxford professor of archaeology Chris Gosden explores the unique and often misunderstood history of magic—the oldest and most neglected strand of human behavior. Gosden reveals magic's essential role in shaping civilizations, from the curses and charms of ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish traditions to the shamanistic practices of Eurasia, indigenous America, and Afri...

Brought to you by Penguin.Three great strands of practice and belief run through human history - science, religion and magic. Over the last few centuries, magic - the idea that we have a connection with the universe, and that the universe responds to us - has developed a bad reputation. But it is still with us, as it has been for millennia, as Professor Chris Gosden shows in this extraordinarily bold and unprecedented history.As Gosden argues, magic precede...

Anthropolgy and Archaeology provides a valuable and much-needed introduction to the theories and methods of these two inter-related subjects.This volume covers the historical relationship and contemporary interests of archaeology and anthropology. It takes a broad historical approach, setting the early history of the disciplines with the colonial period during which the Europeans encountered and attempted to make sense of many other peoples. It shows how the subjects are li...

Colonialism has shaped the world we live in today and has often been studied at a global level, but there is less understanding of how colonial relations operated locally. This book takes twentieth-century Papua New Guinea as its focus, and charts the changes in colonial relationships as they were expressed through the flow of material culture. Exploring the links between colonialism and material culture in general, the authors focus on the particular insights that museum collections can p...

Long before the Norman Conquest of 1066, England saw periods of profound change that transformed the landscape and the identities of those who occupied it. The Bronze and Iron Ages saw the introduction of now-familiar animals and plants, such as sheep, horses, wheat, and oats, as well as new forms of production and exchange and the first laying out of substantial fields and trackways, which continued into the earliest Romano-British landscapes. The Anglo-Saxon period saw the creation of ne...

This volume represents an introduction to a new world-wide attempt to review the history of technology, which is one of few since the pioneering publications of the 1960s. It takes an explicit archaeological focus to the study of the history of technology and adopts a more explicit socially-embedded view of technology than has commonly been the case in mainstream histories of technology. In doing so, it attempts to introduce a more radical element to explanations of technological change, i...

'Chris Gosden brings his encyclopaedic knowledge of world archaeology to bear on some of the most urgent issues of our time' **David Wengrow, author of The Dawn of EverythingWhat if everything you thought you knew about human history was only part of the story?**Life for our earliest ancestors was demanding, dangerous and short, with only the fittest surviving. Homo sapiens triumphed over other related species, creating productive agricultural soci...

What if everything you thought you knew about human history was only part of the story? Humans: Our Seven Million Year History offers an ambitious re-examination of our past on a truly global scale, integrating groundbreaking archaeological and scientific discoveries to present a nuanced and comprehensive narrative.Traditional histories often paint human progress as a straightforward journey: from apes to Homo sapiens, small egalitarian groups to vast empires, and...

Anthropologists of the senses have long argued that cultures differ in their sensory registers. This groundbreaking volume applies this idea to material culture and the social practices that endow objects with meanings in both colonial and postcolonial relationships. It challenges the privileged position of the sense of vision in the analysis of material culture. Contributors argue that vision can only be understood in relation to the other senses. In this they present another challenge to...

The Prehistory of Food sets subsistence in its social context by focusing on food as a cultural artefact. It brings together contributors with a scientific and biological expertise as well as those interested in the patterns of consumption and social change, and includes a wide range of case studies.