How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Vision, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times

摘要

Perec S. Wells Princeton university press 304 pp. £24.95 (2012) Look at a pot predating the Roman Empire, or a Bronze Age burial site, and your interpretation of form and pattern will be vastly at variance with that of their makers. So says anthropologist Peter Wells, who argues that in late prehistoric Europe - a world that lacked the written word and was thin on 'stuff' - people's perceptions were very different from our own. Wells 'reads' tools, vehicles, ornaments, textiles and buildings to reveal a neurobiological map of profound changes in ancient society.