Breakout : The Origins of Civilization (Peabody Museum Monographs No. 9) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0873659104 ISBN 13: 9780873659109

Publisher: Peabody Museum Press, 2000

Synopsis

For much of the twentieth century, Mesopotamia was thought to he the singular “Cradle of Civilization,” and the agents of change that brought it about were thought to be demographic, ecological, and technological. Bronze Age Mesopotamian accomplishments were believed to have diffused outward, influencing the development of civilization in the rest of the world. Part of this Mesopocentric view was revised as archaeological evidence revealed that other unique civilizations had existed in both the Old and New Worlds, but the traditional Near Eastern pattern of development continued to serve as a model.

In the mid-1980s, however, Harvard’s Kwang-chih Chang proposed in Symbols―a publication of Harvard’s Peabody Museum and Department of Anthropology―that China’s first civilization did not evolve according to the conventional Mesopotamian model and argued instead for a new paradigm for understanding the origins of civilization in ancient China and the New World.

In this collection of subsequent Symbols articles and other essays, Maya and Near Eastern studies specialists engage in a stimulating debate of Chang’s thesis, also presented here.

About this title

Review

“What we see here...is intellectual interaction as it happened--something that is characteristic of verbal interaction but is rarely seen in the written word. Given the high caliber of the contributors, this conversational quality gives the book unusual interest.”―Journal of Anthropological Research

Edition details

• Publisher: Peabody Museum Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0873659104
• ISBN 13: 9780873659109
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 152
• Editor: Lamberg-Karlovsky Martha