Bøger om Førhistoriske

"I just plain loved In the Land of Temple Caves. Frederick Turner makes a compelling case for civility organized in response to culture-shaping art as our most ancient source of saving graces. Beautifully said, humanely thought out, the story he tells is particularly useful in these sorrowful times. Read, and take heart!" -William Kittredge, author of The Willow FieldIn the Land of Temple Caves travels back to the very beginning of Art to assess anew its meanings in the long human story. Frederick Turner makes a personal investigation of sanctuaries in France and Spain that the great mythographer Joseph Campbell called the "temple caves," the earliest known of which contains paintings and engravings more than 32,000 years old, works of art more advanced than the hunting implements by which their creators lived. In caves and prehistoric shelters, along the valleys tracing the mighty rivers of the Ice Age, in a war-ravaged village, and in a city church far removed from the country of the caves, Turner finds resonant meaning in what he has always believed to be true. Art does matter-vitally-and never more than now.

"This volume assembles leading Near Eastern art historians, archaeologists, and philologists to examine and apply critical contemporary approaches to the arts and artifacts of the ancient Near East. The contributions in the volume, which include a comprehensive first chapter by the editor and twelve paired chapters (each of which explores a key theme of the volume through a specific case study), are divided into six sections: Representation, Context, Complexity, Materiality, Space, and Time / Afterlives. A number of sub-themes and questions also thread through the volume as a whole: how might art historical, archaeological, anthropological, and philological approaches to the Near East complement and inform each other? How do word and image relate? And how might the field of Near Eastern studies not only adapt and apply approaches developed in other fields but also contribute to critical contemporary discourses? The volume is unified both by the themes that thread through it and by the comprehensive first chapter in the volume, which explores the status of Near Eastern arts and artifacts as simultaneously non-Western and ancient and as neither of these, and which provides a larger theoretical framework for issues addressed in the volume as a whole"--

In They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever, 'Nlaka' pamux elder Annie York explains the red ochre inscriptions written on the rocks and cliffs of the lower Stein Valley in British Columbia. This is perhaps the first time that a Native elder has presented a detailed and comprehensive explanation of rock art images from her people's culture. As Annie York's narratives unfold, we are taken back to the fresh wonder of childhood, as well as to a time in human society when people and animals lived together in one psychic dimension. This book describes, among many other things, the solitary spiritual meditations of young people in the mountains, a form of education once essential to all those who wished to succeed in life with their particular talents. Astrological predictions, herbal medicine, winter spirit dancing, hunting, shamanism, respect for nature, midwifery, birth and death, are some of the topics that emerge from Annie's reading of the trail signs and other cultural symbols painted on the rocks. She firmly believed that this knowledge should be published so that the general public could understand why, as she put it, "The Old People reverenced those sacred places like that Stein." They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever opens a discussion of some of the issues in rock art research that relate to "notating" and "writing" on the landscape, around the world and through the millennia. This landmark publication presents a well-reasoned hypothesis to explain the evolution of symbolic or iconic writing from sign language, trail signs and from the geometric and iconic imagery of the dreams and visions of shamans and neophyte hunters. This book suggests that the resultant images, written or painted on stone, constitute a Protoliteracy which has assisted, for millennia, both the conceptualization and communication of hunting peoples' histories, philosophies, morals and ways of life, and prepared the human mind for the economic, sociological and intellectual developments - including alphabetic written language - which have propelled human history into the modern era.