Download or read book The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age written by Richard Rudgley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2000-01-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the history of mankind during the Neolithic Age, and presents evidence that the Stone Age human was more advanced than science originally thought. Includes figures and photographs.
Download or read book The Substance of Civilization written by Stephen L. Sass and published by Skyhorse Publishing Inc.. This book was released on 2011-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates the way in which the discovery, application, and adaptation of materials has shaped the course of human history and the routines of our daily existence.
Download or read book Prehistory First Empires and the Ancient World written by Markus Hattstein and published by The Rosen Publishing Group. This book was released on 2013 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a chronicle of world events, from the first great civilizations and the religions of India, China, and Japan to the Rise of the Byzantium and China's first emperors of the Qin and Han dynasties.
Download or read book The Substance of Civilization written by Stephen L. Sass and published by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of human civilization can be read most deeply in the materials we have found or created, used or abused. They have dictated how we build, eat, communicate, wage war, create art, travel, and worship. Some, such as stone, iron, and bronze, lend their names to the ages. Others, such as gold, silver, and diamond, contributed to the rise and fall of great empires. How would history have unfolded without glass, paper, steel, cement, or gunpowder? The impulse to master the properties of our material world and to invent new substances has remained unchanged from the dawn of time; it has guided and shaped the course of history. Sass shows us how substances and civilizations have evolved together. In antiquity, iron was considered more precious than gold. The celluloid used in movie film had its origins in the search for a substitute for ivory billiard balls. The same clay used in the pottery of antiquity has its uses in today’s computer chips. Moving from the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon, from the days of prehistoric survival to the cutting edge of nanotechnology, this fascinating and accessible book connects the worlds of minerals and molecules to the sweep of human history, and shows what materials will dominate the century ahead.
Download or read book America Before written by Graham Hancock and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Instant New York Times Bestseller! Was an advanced civilization lost to history in the global cataclysm that ended the last Ice Age? Graham Hancock, the internationally bestselling author, has made it his life's work to find out--and in America Before, he draws on the latest archaeological and DNA evidence to bring his quest to a stunning conclusion. We’ve been taught that North and South America were empty of humans until around 13,000 years ago – amongst the last great landmasses on earth to have been settled by our ancestors. But new discoveries have radically reshaped this long-established picture and we know now that the Americas were first peopled more than 130,000 years ago – many tens of thousands of years before human settlements became established elsewhere. Hancock's research takes us on a series of journeys and encounters with the scientists responsible for the recent extraordinary breakthroughs. In the process, from the Mississippi Valley to the Amazon rainforest, he reveals that ancient "New World" cultures share a legacy of advanced scientific knowledge and sophisticated spiritual beliefs with supposedly unconnected "Old World" cultures. Have archaeologists focused for too long only on the "Old World" in their search for the origins of civilization while failing to consider the revolutionary possibility that those origins might in fact be found in the "New World"? America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization is the culmination of everything that millions of readers have loved in Hancock's body of work over the past decades, namely a mind-dilating exploration of the mysteries of the past, amazing archaeological discoveries and profound implications for how we lead our lives today.
Download or read book Flesh and Stone written by Richard Sennett and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Classical Greece and Rome to medieval and Renaissance Europe, from Hogarth's London to the metropolis of today, cities have been at the centre of human existence for thousands of years. By examining individual cities at their most pivotal moments in history, and the way people lived in them, Richard Sennett traces changing attitudes to concepts such as space, burial, sanctuary and planning. He provides fascinating insights into the interaction between the human body and the spaces of the city it inhabits, evoking the sounds, smells and bustle throughout the centuries. And he asks whether modern cities starve people's sensual experience.
Download or read book A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India written by Upinder Singh and published by Pearson Education India. This book was released on 2008 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India is the most comprehensive textbook yet for undergraduate and postgraduate students. It introduces students to original sources such as ancient texts, artefacts, inscriptions and coins, illustrating how historians construct history on their basis. Its clear and balanced explanation of concepts and historical debates enables students to independently evaluate evidence, arguments and theories. This remarkable textbook allows the reader to visualize and understand the rich and varied remains of India s ancient past, transforming the process of discovering that past into an exciting experience.
Download or read book Seed of Knowledge Stone of Plenty written by John A. Burke and published by Council Oak Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Burke and Halbert present the scientific evidence behind their startling, original theory: ancient peoples constructed temples, mounds, and megaliths to increase the fertility of crops. These peoples used an ancient technology, only now rediscovered.
Download or read book The Dawn of Everything written by David Graeber and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
Download or read book Jungle of Stone written by William Carlsen and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed chronicle of the discovery of the legendary lost civilization of the Maya. Includes the history of the major Maya sites, including Palenque, Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Tuloom, Copan, and more. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Illustrated with a map and more than 100 images. In 1839, rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world’s most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood—both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome—sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would upend the West’s understanding of human history. In the tradition of Lost City of Z and In the Kingdom of Ice, former San Francisco Chronicle journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist William Carlsen reveals the remarkable story of the discovery of the ancient Maya. Enduring disease, war, and the torments of nature and terrain, Stephens and Catherwood meticulously uncovered and documented the remains of an astonishing civilization that had flourished in the Americas at the same time as classic Greece and Rome—and had been its rival in art, architecture, and power. Their masterful book about the experience, written by Stephens and illustrated by Catherwood, became a sensation, hailed by Edgar Allan Poe as “perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published” and recognized today as the birth of American archaeology. Most important, Stephens and Catherwood were the first to grasp the significance of the Maya remains, understanding that their antiquity and sophistication overturned the West’s assumptions about the development of civilization. By the time of the flowering of classical Greece (400 b.c.), the Maya were already constructing pyramids and temples around central plazas. Within a few hundred years the structures took on a monumental scale that required millions of man-hours of labor, and technical and organizational expertise. Over the next millennium, dozens of city-states evolved, each governed by powerful lords, some with populations larger than any city in Europe at the time, and connected by road-like causeways of crushed stone. The Maya developed a cohesive, unified cosmology, an array of common gods, a creation story, and a shared artistic and architectural vision. They created stucco and stone monuments and bas reliefs, sculpting figures and hieroglyphs with refined artistic skill. At their peak, an estimated ten million people occupied the Maya’s heartland on the Yucatan Peninsula, a region where only half a million now live. And yet by the time the Spanish reached the “New World,” the Maya had all but disappeared; they would remain a mystery for the next three hundred years. Today, the tables are turned: the Maya are justly famous, if sometimes misunderstood, while Stephens and Catherwood have been nearly forgotten. Based on Carlsen’s rigorous research and his own 1,500-mile journey throughout the Yucatan and Central America, Jungle of Stone is equally a thrilling adventure narrative and a revelatory work of history that corrects our understanding of Stephens, Catherwood, and the Maya themselves.
Download or read book The Stones of Tiahuanaco written by Stella Nair and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2013-12-31 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's most artful and skillful stone architecture is found at Tiahuanaco at the southern end of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. The precision of the stone masonry rivals that of the Incas to the point that writers from Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth century to twentieth-century authors have claimed that Tiahuanaco not only served as a model for Inca architecture and stone masonry, but that the Incas even imported stonemasons from the Titicaca Basin to construct their buildings. Experiments aimed at replicating the astounding feats of the Tiahuanaco stonecutters--perfectly planar surfaces, perfect exterior and interior right angles, and precision to within 1 mm--throw light on the stonemasons' skill and knowledge, especially of geometry and mathematics. Detailed analyses of building stones yield insights into the architecture of Tiahuanaco, including its appearance, rules of composition, canons, and production, filling a significant gap in the understanding of Tiahuanaco's material culture.
Download or read book History of Ancient Civilization written by Charles Seignobos and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-07-09 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History Of Ancient Civilization By Charles Seignobos CHAPTER I THE ORIGINS OF CIVILIZATION PREHISTORIC ARCHÆOLOGY Prehistoric Remains.-One often finds buried in the earth, weapons, implements, human skeletons, débris of every kind left by men of whom we have no direct knowledge. These are dug up by the thousand in all the provinces of France, in Switzerland, in England, in all Europe; they are found even in Asia and Africa. It is probable that they exist in all parts of the world. These remains are called prehistoric because they are more ancient than written history. For about fifty years men have been engaged in recovering and studying them. Today most museums have a hall, or at least, some cases filled with these relics. A museum at Saint-German-en-Laye, near Paris, is entirely given up to prehistoric remains. In Denmark is a collection of more than 30,000 objects. Every day adds to the discoveries as excavations are made, houses built, and cuts made for railroads. These objects are not found on the surface of the ground, but ordinarily buried deeply where the earth has not been disturbed. They are recovered from a stratum of gravel or clay which has been deposited gradually and has fixed them in place safe from the air, a sure proof that they have been there for a long time. Prehistoric Science.-Scholars have examined the débris and have asked themselves what men have left them. From their skeletons, they have tried to construct their physical appearance; from their tools, the kind of life they led. They have determined that these instruments resemble those used by certain savages today. The study of all these objects constitutes a new science, Prehistoric Archæology. The Four Ages.-Prehistoric remains come down to us from very diverse races of men; they have been deposited in the soil at widely different epochs since the time when the mammoth lived in western Europe, a sort of gigantic elephant with woolly hide and curved tusks. This long lapse of time may be divided into four periods, called Ages: 1. The Rough Stone Age.2. The Polished Stone Age.3. The Bronze Age.4. The Iron Age. The periods take their names from the materials used in the manufacture of the tools, -stone, bronze, iron. These epochs, however, are of very unequal length. It may be that the Rough Stone Age was ten times as long as the Age of Iron. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.
Download or read book Across Atlantic Ice written by Dennis J. Stanford and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea and introduced the distinctive stone tools of the Clovis culture. Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge that narrative. Their hypothesis places the technological antecedents of Clovis technology in Europe, with the culture of Solutrean people in France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago, and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought."--Back cover.
Download or read book The Aztecs written by Frances F. Berdan and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this rich and surprising book, Frances F. Berdan shines fresh light on the enigmatic ancient Aztecs. She casts her net wide, covering topics as diverse as ethnicity, empire-building, palace life, etiquette, origin myths, and human sacrifice. While the Aztecs are often described as “stone age,” their achievements were remarkable. They constructed lofty temples and produced fine arts in precious stones, gold, and shimmering feathers. They crafted beautiful poetry and studied the sciences. They had schools and libraries, entrepreneurs and money, and a bewildering array of deities and dramatic ceremonies. Based on the latest research and lavishly illustrated, this book reveals the Aztecs to have created a civilization of sophistication and finesse.
Download or read book Witness to History written by Various and published by Rosen Young Adult. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers will learn about history visually, making this volume exciting and appealing to readers of all ages. They will explore the evolution of human civilization from pre-history to the contemporary world, including the Middle Ages and early Modern Period, the Modern Era through World War II, and the mid 20th century to the present day. This educational volume covers details about these time periods that most other history books overlook. With full-color images and illustrations, readers are taken on a voyage into past worlds in a manner that heavy-textual history books cannot achieve.
Download or read book Stone Age Economics written by Marshall Sahlins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stone Age Economics is a classic of economic anthropology, ambitiously tackling the nature of economic life and how to study it comparatively. This collection of six influential essays is one of Marshall Sahlins' most important and enduring works, claiming that stone age economies formed the original affluent society. The book examines notions of production, distribution and exchange in early communities and examines the link between economics and cultural and social factors. This edition includes a new foreword by the author.
Download or read book Archaeology and History in Sardinia from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages written by Stephen L. Dyson and published by UPenn Museum of Archaeology. This book was released on 2007 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With one of the richest archaeological records and most complicated histories in the Mediterranean, Sardinia provides an important laboratory for studying the interaction of indigenous societies and outside forces in a partly isolated geographical context. Stephen L. Dyson and Robert J. Rowland, Jr. use both material culture and written documents to reconstruct the social and economic processes of an island society that showed both cultural creativity and continuity but responded to invasions from the Phoenicians through the Romans to the Aragonese. This first accessible reconstruction of island archaeology provides a balanced picture of the sweep of Sardinian history.
