Sull'Autore
Opere di David W. Anthony
Opere correlate
Reconfiguring the Silk Road: New Research on East-West Exchange in Antiquity (2014) — Collaboratore — 5 copie
Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation (British Archaeological Reports (BAR) International) (1997) — Collaboratore — 4 copie
Dispersals and Diversification: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on the Early Stages of Indo-european… (2019) — Collaboratore — 2 copie
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Anthony, David W.
- Data di nascita
- 1949
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Istruzione
- University of Pennsylvania
- Attività lavorative
- professor
archaeologist - Relazioni
- Brown, Dorcas (wife)
- Organizzazioni
- Hartwick College
Utenti
Recensioni
Liste
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 2
- Opere correlate
- 3
- Utenti
- 960
- Popolarità
- #26,838
- Voto
- 4.0
- Recensioni
- 29
- ISBN
- 5
- Preferito da
- 2
This book is full of examples of scientific work and discovery that give the layman a true appreciation for all the tedious, impossibly incremental work that builds a theoretical structure on which to hang such a ludicrous-sounding idea. The author discusses dozens or perhaps hundreds of different cultures and societies spread across continents and continental expanses of time. These cultures are known from artifacts that have first been discovered, then dug up, then catalogued and radiocarbon dated (a technique which i know understand to be incredibly complicated thanks to this book), then fit into the grand scheme of archeological data that only in the aggregate gives us a picture of some tiny shard of a life from thousands of years ago. Equally if not more impressive is the process by which linguists have triangulated similarities in far-flung languages in order to cast a ghostly apparition of what the Proto-Indo-European language might have sounded like. It makes your head spin to consider the huge amount of brain and man power spent to make even the smallest bit of progress.
The thing about archeology and linguistics in particular that has always drawn me to them over other sciences is they are really the study of what makes us essentially human. Learning more about deep space or quantum physics is cool and all, but the questions taken up in this book affect millions of peoples lives every day, but at such a deep level that its almost unnoticeable. Writing this review right now puts me in debt to the very nomadic people who are described in this book. The author mentions in the beginning of the book the short time frame that even very well known people have persisted in historical records. For the vast majority of humanity, no one will remember your name or who you were one hundred years after you die. The fact that the world we inhabit today will continue to evolve and change into what may seem like an alien planet, just as the people of the prehistoric Eurasian steppe would surely see us. It takes ingenuity and holy curiosity to excavate the ties that bind us to what happened thousands of years ago. This kind of work isn’t merely egghead research on esoteric topics, its a search for knowledge that has the capacity to revolutionize the way we see death, history, the passage of time, and especially, the meaning we attach to our language and identity. One of the great repeated shocks of life is both a cliché and a rarely heeded piece of wisdom: everything is always changing, nothing stays the same. This truism is especially true in anything human beings do. Too many lives are stunted (not to mention wars started and atrocities committed) by a poor understanding of time in its vast expanse. Maybe work like that described in this book can help make some people more aware.
The first quarter of this book is 5 stars. Like the urban civilizations that rimmed the vast Eurasian steppe, once you pass a certain point, you enter what might seem like a desolate, undifferentiated landscape to the untrained eye. Most of this book is about hardcore archeology, and I came for the language stuff. Trudging through hundreds of pages describing the pottery and burial rituals of sundry tribes and chiefdoms was definitely a slog, and made me wonder if this book we intended for a more specialized audience. When it enters into existential questions about human nature, society, and language, the writing is beautiful and clearly comes from a place of deep passion. Every once in a while i came across and little factoid or idea that, like a river or patch of forest on the steppe broke up the monotony. But it was soon back to the litany of sites and findings and cultural horizons that I’m just not educated enough to care about.… (altro)