"Still Points" is a collection of remarkable and evocative still photographs taken by award-winning nonfiction filmmaker and author Robert Gardner during his anthropological and filming expeditions around the world. Thousands of his original photogra...

Epitomizing the radiating sun and perpetuating the cycles of life and time, fire was – and continues to be – a central force in the Mesoamerican cosmos. Mesoamericans understood heat and flames as animate forces that signified strength and vitality;...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! The Royal Tombs of Ur, dating from approximately 3000-2700 BCE, are among the most famous and impressive archeological discoveries of the twentieth century. Excavated between 1922 and 1934...

Shem Pete (1896-1989), a colorful and brilliant raconteur from Susitna Station, Alaska, left a rich legacy of knowledge about the Upper Cook Inlet Dena'ina world. Shem was one of the most versatile storytellers and historians in twentieth century Ala...

In the final years of the twentieth century, emigres from engineering and computer science devoted themselves to biology and resolved that if the aim of biology is to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than experimentation....

Thomas Blanton sheds light on the philosophy surrounding gift giving in Paul's letters and on modern theories of gift exchange through the lens of religion. The exchange of gifts is a fundamental part of society and a foundational element in Greco-Ro...

After more than eighty years of international research on the Indus Civilization, this geographically extensive ancient society remains deeply enigmatic. With no known monumental art or deciphered texts, the largest category of representational art r...

While working in Africa, anthropologist Julien Bonhomme encountered an astonishing phenomenon: people being accused of stealing or shrinking the genitals of strangers on the simple occasion of a handshake on the street. As he soon discovered, these a...

A riveting look at how the early modern world revolutionized sleep and its relation to body, mind, soul, and society Drawing on diverse archival sources and material artifacts, Handley reveals that the way we sleep is as dependent on culture as it is...

From antiquity to the modern age, legal, documentary, exegetical, literary, and linguistic traditions have viewed the relationship between image and letter in diverse ways. There is a long history of scholarship examining this relationship, probing t...