1300 187 187
"Dancing at the Dawn of Agriculture offers fresh insights into live in the Cradle of Civilisation, and will hopefully serve as great sustenance for future thought on this intriguing issue." -- Minerva
As the nomadic hunters and gatherers of the ancient Near East turned to agriculture for their livelihood and settled into villages, religious ceremonies involving dancing became their primary means for bonding individuals into communities and households into villages. So important was dance that scenes of dancing are among the oldest and most persistent themes in Near Eastern prehistoric art, and these depictions of dance accompanied the spread of agriculture into surrounding regions of Europe and Africa.
In this pathfinding book, Yosef Garfinkel analyzes depictions of dancing found on archaeological objects from the Near East, southeastern Europe, and Egypt to offer the first comprehensive look at the role of dance in these Neolithic (7000-4000 BC) societies. In the first part of the book, Garfinkel examines the structure of dance, its functional roles in the community (with comparisons to dance in modern pre-state societies), and its cognitive, or symbolic, aspects. This analysis leads him to assert that scenes of dancing depict real community rituals linked to the agricultural cycle and that dance was essential for maintaining these calendrical rituals and passing them on to succeeding generations. In the concluding section of the book, Garfinkel presents and discusses the extensive archaeological data-- some 400 depictions of dance-- on which his study is based.
"In a highly original and impeccably researched book, Professor Garfinkel examines the cultural origins of primitive dance... Dancing at the Dawn of Agriculture offers fresh insights into life in the Cradle of Civilization, and will hopefully serve as great sustenance for future thought on this intriguing issue."--Minvera, November/December, 2004
| List of Figures | p. ix |
| List of Tables | p. xv |
| Acknowledgments | p. xvii |
| The Dance Analysis | p. 1 |
| Introduction | p. 3 |
| Structural Analysis of the Dance | p. 27 |
| Functional Analysis of the Dance | p. 65 |
| Cognitive Analysis of the Dancing Scenes | p. 85 |
| Conclusions | p. 99 |
| The Data | p. 103 |
| General Remarks Concerning the Data | p. 105 |
| Neolithic Near East | p. 111 |
| Halafian and Samarra Cultures | p. 125 |
| Neolithic and Chalcolithic Iran | p. 161 |
| Neolithic Southeast Europe | p. 205 |
| Predynastic Egypt | p. 233 |
| Later Examples from the Near East | p. 269 |
| Appendix: The Figures with "Turned-Upwards Legs" | p. 291 |
| Bibliography | p. 297 |
| Index | p. 319 |
| Table of Contents provided by Rittenhouse. All Rights Reserved. |
ISBN: 9780292728455
ISBN-10: 029272845X
Audience:
Professional
Format:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 352
Published: 31st May 2003
Dimensions (cm): 26.7 x 18.6
x 2.9
Weight (kg): 0.984
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