Book Description
Moving beyond the limited focus of the individual strategic theorist or the great military leader, The Making of Strategy concentrates instead on the processes by which rulers and states have formed strategy. Seventeen case studies--from the fifth century B.C. to the present--analyze through a common framework how strategists have sought to implement a coherent course of action against their adversaries. This fascinating book considers the impact of such complexities as the geographic, political, economic and technical forces that have driven the transformation of strategy since the beginning of civilization and seem likely to alter the making of strategy in the future.
Customer Reviews:
Essential reading for the seriuos student of strategy........2003-04-21
The purpose of "The Making of Strategy" is to give the reader an insight into how strategy has been made in the past. This is done through various historical case studies which range from Ancient Greece to American Cold War nuclear policy. Each essay tries to show events from the perspectives of those who were involved and attempts to get inside the mindset of the people who had to forumlate and then implement the various strategies.
As has been stated, the essays span a considerable time period, though there is perhaps (definitely in fact) a weighting towards 20th century strategy. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is probably dependant upon the reader's personal taste but I didn't have a problem with it.
The quality of the essays is invariably of a very high quality and the contributors are leaders in the field of Strategic Studies (Colin Gray, Donald Kagan, Eliot Cohen, the late Michael Handel, Williamson Murray, Macgregor Knox etc). Standout chapters include Holger Herwig's withering analysis of Imperial German strategy in the post-Bismarck period and (by virtue both of quality and of the fact that it tackles a relatively obscure and much neglected power's policy) Brian Sullivan's chapter on Italian grand strategy in the build-up to the First World War.
The chapters (excluding the excellent and extensive introduction and conclusion) cover the following periods;
- Athenian Strategy in The Peloponnesian Wars
- Roman Strategy against Carthage
- Chinese Strategy from the 14th to the 17th centuries
- Spanish Strategy under Philip II
- English Strategy, 1558-1713
- French Strategy under Louis XIV
- The United States, 1783-1865
- Prussia-Germany 1871-1918
- British Strategy, 1890-1918
- Italian Strategy, 1882-1922
- Germany, 1918-1945
- British Strategy, 1918-1945
- U.S. Strategy, 1920-1945
- French Strategy in the inter-war period
- Soviet Strategy, 1917-1945
- Israeli Strategy
- U.S. Nuclear Strategy
Aside from the fact that the quality of the chapters is of a very high standard, the great virtue of this book is the way in which it looks into the way nations have made strategy, rather than dealing with specific strategic theories or trying to provide a guide on how strategy should be made (lessons drawn from history aside). It illustrates clearly the frustrations, the balancing of interests, the difficulty in seeing the big picture, the weighing up of ends and means and the FRICTION that plagues policymakers when they put the books away and actually have to make the magic happen.
This book should be read by anybody with a serious interest in Strategic/War Studies. It's a little gem. At over 600 pages, you get your money's worth too.
Essential for strategy in any field of action.......2002-04-24
The book brings back historically those features that are essential in any strategy for most activities, altgough is focused in war. Basic reading for bussines.
Excellent & Easy reading.......1999-08-16
"The Making of Strategy" examines the strategy-making processes through the cultural, social, political, organisational and historical ( not just the military ) lenses, starting from the Peloponnesian Wars to the Nuclear Age. The book is also excellent in inrtoducing the concept of Weltanschauung; how a nation's strategic choices are often products of its strategic culture. This helps the reader to understand that despite advances in military technologies; why most wars are fought the way they are fought. Very easy reading and excellent book on the little known process of how strategy is often made.
Book Description
Did Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages cohabit in a peaceful "interfaith utopia?" Or were Jews under Muslim rule persecuted, much as they were in Christian lands? Rejecting both polemically charged "myths," Mark Cohen offers a systematic comparison of Jewish life in medieval Islam and Christendom--the first in-depth explanation of why medieval Islamic-Jewish relations, though not utopic, were less confrontational and violent than those between Christians and Jews in the West.
Customer Reviews:
The Most Balanced and Thorough Study of its Kind. Highly Recommended!.......2007-02-14
Mark Cohen's comparative study of the status of Jews under Christendom and Islam during the Middle Ages is the most sophisticated, nuanced, meticulous, and persuasively-argued study of its kind. The extremely negative customer review on this page betrays the bias of its author. Citing from Bat Ye'or to demonstrate that the Jewish position in Islam has always been wretched is an exercise in futility. Bat Ye'or is anti-Muslim to an extreme. She thanks "Judeo-Christian" values for the positive treatment Jews currently receive at the hands of the post-Holocaust Western world. As if the previous 1800 years of expulsions, libels, massacres, burnings at the stake, forced conversions, and genocidal attacks pursued in various periods by elements (i.e. states or populaces) loyal to the Catholic Church, the various Eastern Orthodox Churches and, in its first two hundred years, the Protestant Churches as well, never occurred or are somehow irrelevant. It was rather the separation of church and state that resulted from the 18th century Enlightenment that allowed for the fair treatment Jews currently experience in Western countries, although that too must be modified by the brutal pogroms in Russia in which thousands of Jewish men, women, and children were slaughtered, as well as the Holocaust perpetrated by European Christians, some of whom (such as in Croatia) were religious, though most were not.
When thousands of Jews across Europe were being burned alive on the streets during the Black Plague (1348 and further), Jews in Muslim lands were able to live and practice their religion, without fear that the local Muslim populations would associate them with the devil and kill them on the basis of outlandish libels. The example of the Black Plague is particularly illustrative of the gap between the medieval Jewish experience under Islam and Christendom, since the Muslim lands were stricken as heavily by this epidemic as the Christian lands, and yet there is not one single recorded instance of Muslims accusing Jews of having been responsible for the plague, whereas in Christian Europe it was just this accusation that was so widespread and consistently served as a pretext for large-scale massacres of Jews. Sure, there were instances of persecution of Jews in Muslim lands, but they were few and far between, and the most significant of the limited number of such persecutions were carried out by heteredox sects such as the fanatical Almohades (Spain, 12th century) and the Caliph al-Hakim (Egypt, Palestine, early 11th century), who was clearly deranged in the most literal sense in the view of most historians. The fact that Jews were discriminated against throughout the Muslim world must be understood in the context of its time: in the Middle Ages, tolerance was not regarded as a virtue, but a weakness, and no one practiced it in the modern sense of the term. Without any doubt, the protected status accorded Jews in return for payment of the discriminatory taxes and other regulations was far better than their brothers in Christian Europe could imagine. Cohen cites numerous primary sources that demonstrate that the self-perception of medieval Jews themselves was that Muslims did not buy into the absurd accusations hurled against Jews in Christendom and that the Jewish experience under Islam was not regarded as "galut" (exile) in the same sense in which it was in Christendom.
If there is any flaw in Cohen's book, it is in his ambiguously-worded statement on the very last page which might seem to suggest that the thirteenth century marked a new era for Jews under Islam, one that might perhaps (though Cohen doesn't say this) rival Jewish life in Christendom. Many of Cohen's own citations and much of his argumentation make it clear that this is not the case, and that instead Jews continued to experience a far more secure existence under Islam until the advent of the modern period of Jewish history (i.e. the 18th century) than they did in Christendom, though they were less secure than they had been in the classical period of Islam. This point will be clear to those familiar with the widespread massacres of the 14th century in Northern Europe, the continued persistence of the blood libel in Europe (absent in Islam), the Spanish Inquisition (including the pogroms that preceded it by a century), the expulsions and massacres following the Protestant Reformation, and the massacres of the 1648-1649 Cossack uprising--and the lack of such horrors in the lands of Islam. This is particularly true of the Ottoman Empire, which was a safe haven for Jews in the 16th and 17th centuries (though Catholic Poland was as well). It is just such nuances (i.e. sometimes Jews were persecuted in Muslim lands and sometimes they found haven in Christian lands) which are missed by advocates of what Cohen terms the "countermyth" of Islamic persecution, like Bat Ye'or. (The original "myth" debunked by Cohen is that Jewish life under Islam was an interfaith utopia when, in reality, Jews were always second-class citizens subject to hardships, though they sometimes rose above that position, as in Muslim Spain during the so-called "Golden Age.") Mainstream scholars such as Bernard Lewis, S. D. Goitein, and Cohen himself reject with equal vigor both myths. This nuanced approach is too complicated for people like Bat Ye'or (and Robert Spencer), who think things had to always have been how they are now.
In short, people like Bat Ye'or are engaged in projectionism of the worst kind: the Muslim world today is teeming with the most virulent anti-Semitism imaginable, so it must have always been that way. However, history doesn't work that way. Trends change; the job of the historian is to analyze them dispassionately, which Bat Ye'or, having been expelled from Egypt in a humiliating fashion in the 1950s, is apparently not capable of. (In fact, it is the consensus of historians that anti-Semitism in its conventional sense did not exist in the Muslim world until modern times and that it was only introduced into it by Christian Arabs in the 19th cenury. See p. 208, note 28 of Cohen's book for sources.) As for the other methodological issues raised in the negative customer review, Cohen's book is so meticulous that all of these issues are treated by Cohen himself, some in the very Introdction to his book! Read the book and see for yourself. Just don't be taken in by polemicists who are more concerned with creating simple answers to complex problems (i.e. why did Jewish-Muslim relations deteriorate in the modern period?) than in analyzing history.
Intractably flawed, meaningless analysis.......2002-07-09
Admirably, Professor Cohen proposes "..a broad investigation of Medieval Islamic-Jewish and Christian-Jewish relations that builds on comparative insights..". A serious, objective comparison of these, or any other similar historical relationships requires, at minimum (1) a valid research design; (2) inclusion of ALL the relevant data. Unfortunately, Professor Cohen's scholarship fails to satisfy either of these basic criteria, rendering his analyses completely invalid.
There are intractable flaws in both the basic design and (arbitrarily limited) scope of Professor Cohen's analyses. Cohen acknowledges deliberately choosing northern European Christendom to make "..contrasts..more vivid..", as opposed to southern Europe, where the Jews had an enduring, indigenous presence. Cohen further confesses to omitting discussion of the northern European "..Polish-Jewish experience during the late Middle Ages.." precisely because these Jews enjoyed a status "..so seemingly the inverse of their ..beleaguered brethren in western Latin Christendom..". Cohen's highly arbitrary, selective categorization of an alleged northern European Christian "heartland", should at least in fairness have been compared to its Islamic "equivalent", i.e., Arabia, North Africa, and the Sahara, as opposed to the Islamized regions of the conquered Byzantine Empire with their inherent religious and ethnic pluralism. This geographical arbitrariness is matched by Cohen's highly selective periodization (i.e., 640-1240 C.E.). Clearly, comparing the fate of Jews under Islam and Christendom during the combined historical period covering the Ages of European Enlightenment and Emancipation would result in a completely different view.
Even when one ignores these serious basic flaws, multiple other problems with Cohen's analyses persist. Accepting Cohen's arbitrary periodization, for example, the expulsions of Jews from Christian Europe to which he makes reference, actually occurred AFTER 1240 C.E. (i.e., in 1290, 1306, 1394, and 1492-97, C.E.). Moreover, the first three centuries of Islam in the in the East overlapped the Carolingian rule in Christian Europe (747-987 C.E.), a period recognized by scholars as one when European Jewry experienced a considerable degree of security and prosperity. Muslim chroniclers themselves, in contrast, have described the ongoing jihad conquests during the same period involving the massacre of large numbers of indigenous Jewish populations, the enslavement of women and children, and the confiscation of vast territories. Indeed, the period between 640 and 1240 C.E. witnessed the total and definitive destruction of Judaism in the Hijaz (modern Saudi Arabia), and the decline of once flourishing Jewish communities in Palestine (particularly Galilee), Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Finally, by 1240 C.E. the Jewish communities in North Africa had been decimated by Almohad persecutions.
As documented by the scholar of Islamic history Bat Ye'or, numerous Koranic verses and hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) associate the Jews with hell and Satan. She notes three compelling examples of this association. First, that Ibn Abdun (d. 1134) a Muslim jurist from Spain, quoted from the Koran (58:20) to this effect in a legal treatise, "..Satan has gained the mastery over them, and caused them to forget God's Remembrance. Those are Satan's party; why Satan's party are surely the losers!". Second, a decree by the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (850), directing "..wooden images of devils be nailed to the doors of their homes to distinguish them from the homes of Muslims..". Finally, Jewish cemeteries were considered a part of Hell, to which the dhimmis were destined. Professor Robert Wistrich, a scholar of anti-Semitism, summarizes the overall Koranic image of the Jews as justifying their "..abasement and poverty..". He further notes how the oral tradition (hadith) maintains that the Jews had a "perfidious" and "conspiratorial" nature, being responsible for Muhammads's painful death from poisoning, as well as "...to blame for the sectarian strife in early Islam, for heresies and deviations that undermined or endangered the unity of the umma (the Muslim nations).."
Jihad conquests, and the imposition of dhimmitude on the vanquished Jewish populations, institutionalized these Koranic and hadith conceptions of the Jews as a people meriting humiliation. Thus Cohen errors when he contends that the Jews were somehow degraded "uniquely" under Christendom by being forced to practice usury, which was reviled by Christians. Cohen appears oblivious to the fact that under the yoke of dhimmitude in Muslim countries, the most degrading vocations were set aside for the Jews, including: executioners, grave-diggers, salters of the decapitated heads of rebels, and cleaners of latrines (in Yemen, in particular, this was demanded of Jews on Saturdays, their holy sabbath). Islamic societies also exhibited their own unique forms of severe oppression of Jews, NOT found in Christian Europe, such as: abduction of Jewish girls for Muslim harems; enslavement (including women and children) during warfare, revolts, or for economic reasons (for example, impossibility of paying the jizya, a blood ransom "poll tax" demanded of non-Muslims); the obligation for a Jew to dismount from his donkey on sight of a Muslim; the obligation in some regions (like the Maghreb) for Jews to walk barefoot outside their quarters; prohibiting Persian Jews from remaining outdoors when it rained for fear of polluting Muslims. With regard to enslavement, specifically, from the Middle Ages, right up until their mass exodus in 1948, rural Yemenite Jews were literally Muslim chattel. For example, in her essay, "The Dhimmi Factor in the Exodus of Jews from Arab Countries" (from: Shulewitz, M [editor], "The Forgotten Millions", Continuum, [2000, New York], pages 33-51), Bat Ye'or observes :
"Thus, if a Jew belonging to tribe A, is killed by a Muslim from tribe B, then a Jew from tribe B would be killed by a Muslim from tribe A. So two Jews are killed without the Muslim being arrested, a game that could go on for generations as a form of retaliation. In this legal system, a Jew like an object or a camel is excluded from human justice."
Finally, it is particularly important to note that there has NEVER been in Islam (including up until present times) a current analogous to the movement initiated after the 16th century Protestant Reformation in Europe that lead to Jewish emancipation, equal rights, human rights, and secularization of Christian societies.
Under Crescent and Cross.......2001-07-25
It has often been asserted that in medieval times, Jews living in the Muslim lands had it better than their co-religionists in Christendom. Is that assessment accurate? Cohen, professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, attempts an answer in this first-ever book on the comparative history of Jewish life in the two civilizations.
Yes, he concludes, Jews were better off in the Muslim world. In part, this was a matter of physical security. "The Jews of Islam, especially during the formative and classical centuries (up to the thirteenth century), experienced much less persecution than did the Jews of Christendom." Living among Sunni Muslims brought other benefits as well, which Cohen meticulously and convincingly documents: in Dar al-Islam, Jews enjoyed a more regular legal status, they participated far more in the mainstream cultural life, and they had more social interaction with the majority community. In all, Jews living among Muslims were less excluded, making them less vulnerable to assault. Of particular interest, while Christians had a horror of intermarriage, Muslims allowed it on condition that the man was a Muslim. Indeed, Islamic law requires the Muslim husband to permit his Jewish wife to observe her religious rituals, to pray within the family house, to keep the Sabbath, and to maintain the kosher requirements. She may also read her Scriptures, on the important condition that she not do so out loud.
Cohen's study ends with the thirteenth century; we would be much in his debt were he to follow this pathbreaking and excellent study with another on the subsequent deterioration of the Jewish position in the Muslim world.
Middle East Quarterly, September 1995
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Canadian Journal of History, published by University of Saskatchewan on August 1, 1996. The length of the article is 1091 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. (book reviews)
Author: Joseph Shatzmiller
Publication:
Canadian Journal of History (Refereed)
Date: August 1, 1996
Publisher: University of Saskatchewan
Volume: v31
Issue: n2
Page: p286(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Ecumenical Studies, published by Journal of Ecumenical Studies on September 22, 1997. The length of the article is 931 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. (book reviews)
Author: Susan Frank
Publication:
Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 1997
Publisher: Journal of Ecumenical Studies
Volume: v34
Issue: n4
Page: p609(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
The burnt-red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate about their deaths? Did they collect fossils?
Beginning in the East, with its Ice Age monsters, and ending in the West, where dinosaurs lived and died, this richly illustrated and elegantly written book examines the discoveries of enormous bones and uses of fossils for medicine, hunting magic, and spells. Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct creatures and sought to understand their transformation to stone. In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters. Their insights, some so sophisticated that they anticipate modern scientific theories, were passed down in oral histories over many centuries.
Drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional accounts, and extensive personal interviews, Adrienne Mayor takes us from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees. Fossil Legends of the First Americans represents a major step forward in our understanding of how humans made sense of fossils before evolutionary theory developed.
Customer Reviews:
Proving that not all American history is boring.......2007-09-18
I bought this book because I enjoyed Mayor's previous book and I have become interested in American prehistory. This book is more readable than the First Fossil Hunters (which I also enjoyed and learned from), and makes me aware how very large this continent is and how little I know about it. The author's sympathy with the pre-literate peoples does not diminish her appreciation of modern science. It's an enjoyable read and makes me want to visit regions more fossiliferous than New England.
If you happen to be reading it at the same time as When They Separated Earth From Sky (Barber and Barber) it's like being in the middle of an enthusiastic conversation between friends and colleagues.
America's First Fossil Collectors.......2007-03-02
I always wondered how Native Americans interpreted the huge fossil skeletons of extinct animals like giant sloths and mastodons, dinosaurs and Pterodactyls. Natural History Museums in the US never address this question, even though they often display dinosaur skeletons that were dug up on American Indian Reservations.
Mayors book is based on an obvious fact: centuries before Europeans arrived, way before scientists started studying fossils, people in the Americas created stories to try to explain the weird remains of creatures that died out millions of years ago. I was amazed that she found the oldest recorded fossil legends from the Inkas and Aztecs; the book is well-researched and I liked her writing style, as she presents fossil legends told by the Iroquois, Cheyenne, Sioux, Crow, Navaho,Apache, and many other tribes to account for the various kinds of fossils they found.
My favorite were the exciting Lakota Sioux stories about the fossils of giant marine reptiles (Mosasaurs) and huge pterasaurs in the badlands and chalk hills of the west: they attributed the bones to wars between giant water serpents and thunderbirds.
What really impressed me was the way Mayor shows how the Native American ideas about fossils were accurate about a lot of things that scientists would discover later. This is the idea behind geomythology, which has been in the news lately as scientists are beginning to see that the myths about fossils and volcanoes, earthquakes, etc, were based on real evidence and sometimes actually got some things right without modern scientific methods. The Native American tales of fossils talk about earth's first lifeforms in primeval times, changes of species, and extinctions.
In a section at the end of the book, Mayor chronicles some entertaining misinformed accounts and deliberate hoaxes, such as claims that dinos and human beings existed at the same time.
entertaining but............2007-02-26
Nobody knows for sure when dinosaurs lived. Science has refused to use carbon 14 to date any dinosaur bones because they are afraid of what they might learn. Tbey'll date Neanderthals and other animals with carbon 14 --but curiously not dinosaurs.
Of course dinosaurs being many millions of years old has been the story science has told us for the past 100 years. But are they really? This book tells us how American Indians described in glorious detail their encounters with such animals. The author wants us to believe that all these "encounters" were not really encounters at all, but nothing but dreamed-up stories hinging on fossil discoveries. Never mind the fact that American Indians have drawn pictures of dinosaurs on cave walls and that dinosaur bones have been dug up with soft tissue embedded in their bones. Never mind that hundreds of dinosaur eggs have been dug up with fully-formed embryos inside. Never mind that dinosaurs have been depicted all throughout the ancient world in artwork, pottery, stonework and all kinds of literature.
And of course the other thing the author doesn't mention is if all these stories were dreamed up by Indians from mere fossil finds, that would imply that the fossils were probably near or on the surface of the ground. Of course science tells us that dinosaurs are old because of the "strata" they are found. Well what "strata" is on top of the ground? Surely the author doesn't want us to believe that the indians went digging around in the ground, pulled the fossils out, and then re-hingged them all together only to make up stories! If this is the case, why haven't we found fully re-constructed fossils laying on top of the ground?
All in all this book is entertaining but this lady is blinded by Darwin's theory of evolution. She has all this evidence right under her nose, yet she can't see it. In this respect it's rather frustrating.
A second first step.......2005-08-11
Following her innovative and informative study of fossils as roots for myths in the Mediterranean, Mayor brings her investigative talents to the Western Hemisphere. Here, she follows the pattern set in her earlier book, "Ancient Paleontologists" by examining the myths and legends of Native Americans. Did they, like their Eurasian counterparts in Greece, find ancient bones protruding from creek beds and bluffs? Did they also weave legends of fabulous creatures, human giants or spiritual entites from these unusual artefacts? In this account of tales and myths, Mayor's fluid style enlivens the legends, their tellers and the artefacts that inspired them.
Dividing her quest into regional investigations, she surveys the East Coast of North America, skips South to the realm of the Incas, then returns to Great Plains and Pacific Slope. Mayor finds links from recorded stories to the bones of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and mammoths. She is hampered, of course, by the minimal direct information available. She must rely on those who recorded and interpreted the information often gathered from conquered peoples. And many of the earliest records were destroyed by the Christian conquerors. What remains of those records has been the subject of much dispute. In early New England, Puritan Cotton Mather rejected stories and fossils alike as the invalid heritage of the heathen "salvages". In modern times, renowned paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson rejected the notion of Native American fossil finds and the legends surrounding them as lacking scientific value.
Mayor, however, shows how narrow Simpson's view has proven. Taking the legends more seriously, she notes that even President Thomas Jefferson had enough faith in fossil finds to charge the Lewis and Clark expedition with searching for living specimens. It took one of the geniuses of the times, Georges Cuvier, to bestow validity on fossil bones by declaring them the remnants of actual ancient creatures. With so many of the artefacts representing large species, the underlying logic of Native American legends depicting giant people and creatures makes sense.
The tales Mayor recounts are those of huge, terrifying animals or human-like creatures. Some raid the human settlements, only defeated by divine beings or the occasional heroic figure. Many of the stories have these beings eliminated by lightning or "fire from the sky". The powers of the giants were immense, but some felt the strength and size might be imparted to people. It remains unclear how many peoples used the bones for medicinal purposes - reminiscent of the "dragon bones" of apothecary shops in China. From Atlantic to Pacific, on the Plains or in the Andes, the bones emerged, launching fireside stories. The tales show how innovative individuals acquired special powers in the community through knowledge of fossils. These people could give the artefacts meaning or make them useful in various ways. There is a great similarity among the many peoples of the Western Hemisphere on what the strange objects appearing from the ground meant. The theme of giants, great battles and contests with fiery ends recurs often. When recorded in images, whether on tipis or stelae, they are readily identifiable.
Fossils in "enterprising" North America became the subject of frauds and deceptions. To the credulous, artefacts take on a special role and there's money to be made in them. Mayor concludes her book with an account of many of these. Fossils have been used to support "Scripture", such as accounting for the Noachean Flood. A regular business arose in Mexico through a trove of clay figurines purporting to represent ancient Sumer or even Atlantis. Red-haired giants were "found" in Nevada and ceremonies are performed in northern Mexico by people claiming to have recent contact with dinosaurs.
Mayor's books on ancient paleontology are a call for further investigation of a new field of interest. She is a herald for a new, emerging science. Simply finding bones and other fossils is no longer sufficient evidence for assessing the past. Long-term historical and legendary records have much to contribute. Mayor's plea for more studies should be taken up by young [and not so young!] scholars who are open-minded enough to apply new ideas and approaches. Her clear prose style eases the way for anybody interested in these topics to delve into them and perceive the possibilities. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Pioneering and Fun.......2005-05-05
Long before Europeans rediscovered the dinosaur, Native Americans knew about fossils. They collected and tried to explain them, and fossils remain part of the living legacy of Native culture today. Always fascinating and often passionate, this book traces the story of Amerindian fossil-collecting from the Aztecs to the Iroquois and from the pre-Columbian era to the politics of the American West. Adrienne Mayor has written a groundbreaking and scholarly book that is also a pleasure to read. The illustrations are beautiful. Mayor does for Native-American culture what she did for the Greeks and Romans in an earlier book about unknown fossil hunters. Her new volume has many strands, from paleontology to history to Hollywood, and they come together seamlessly.
Average customer rating:
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Ethnomedicine and Chemistry of South American Plants, Volume 2
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