Shamans of the Lost World: A Cognitive Approach to the Prehistoric Religion of the Ohio Hopewell (Issues in Eastern Woodlands Archaeology)

Shamans of the Lost World bridges the gap between recent work in the cognitive sciences and some of humankind's oldest religious expressions. In this detailed look at the prehistoric shamanism of the Ohio Hopewell, Romain uses cognitive science, archaeology, and ethnology to propose that the shamanic world view results from psychological mechanisms that have a basis in our cognitive evolutionary development. The discussions in this volume of the most current theories concerning how early peoples came to believe in spirits and gods, as well as how those theories help account for what we find in the archaeological record of the Hopewell, are of interest to archaeologists and cognitive scientists alike.

William F. Romain is a research associate at Ohio State University and author of Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians of the Eastern Woodland.