From Black Land To Fifth Sun: The Science Of Sacred Sites (Helix Books) - Softcover

Fagan, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0738201413 ISBN 13: 9780738201412

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

Synopsis

Until recently, archaeology was concerned mainly with piecing together the material lives of our ancestors. In this groundbreaking book, master storyteller and respected archaeologist Brian Fagan explains how cutting-edge science can now take us beyond the artifacts into the mystical realm of shamans and spirit mediums, ancestor worship, and ritual sacrifice. From the Nile's black land to the Aztec's world of the Fifth Sun, from Stonehenge to Jericho, Fagan describes how Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Geographic Information Systems, Computer Automated Design-mapping and other sophisticated scientific methods are helping us to decode the religious and spiritual beliefs of our forebears. This new archaeology of the mind” blends a wealth of scientific disciplines from botany, zoology, and geology to neuropsychology, palynology, and nuclear physics. With vivid imagery and a transporting voice, Fagan revolutionizes our understanding of the inner lives of ancient people.

About this title

About the Author

Brian Fagan is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has written many internationally acclaimed popular books about archaeology, including The Little Ice Age, Floods, Famines, and Emperors, and The Long Summer. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

From Publishers Weekly

The unearthing of cave paintings, stone circles, burial mounds, charnel houses, pyramids and the like poses fundamental questions about the relationships between extinct cultures and their perceived worlds. Archaeologist Fagan (The Rape of the Nile) attempts, with the aid of techniques like Accelerator Mass Spectrometry and Computer Automated Design mapping, to bridge the gap between the tangible and intangible, between the material and the spiritual lives of ancient peoples. Advocating the emerging science of the "archaeology of the mind," he suggests that he and his kind are like "Ahabs pursuing our great white whale" since "our limitations of thought, of understandings, of imagination" will prevent us from ever fully reconstructing from the available evidence the worldviews of long-defunct cultures. Nevertheless, his pilgrimageAfrom Lascaux to Zimbabwe; Jericho to Stonehenge; Knossos to the Pyramids of Giza; Chillicothe, Ohio, to Teothihuacan, MexicoAtakes us on an often gripping first-person tour of the world's past, and his excitement in surveying these areas for himself is almost palpable. But the real focus here is on the scienceAfrom debunking conjectures about Stonehenge to reanimating the ?atalh?y?k Goddess cultAand its invaluable contribution to painstaking reconstructions of the time frames and available materials of various eras. While the detail can be a little numbing, the seeming accuracy is refreshing, given the controversy that surrounds many of the more famous sites.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0738201413
• ISBN 13: 9780738201412
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416