Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods | 
 enlarge | Authors: David Lewis-williams, David Pearce
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 394946
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4
ISBN: 0500051380
Dewey Decimal Number: 930.14
EAN: 9780500051382
ASIN: 0500051380
Publication Date: October 1, 2005
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Product Description
An exploration of how brain structure and cultural content interacted in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago to produce unique life patterns and belief systems.
What do the headless figures found in the famous paintings at Catalhoyuk in Turkey have in common with the monumental tombs at Newgrange and Knowth in Ireland? How can the concepts of "birth," "death," and "wild" cast light on the archaeological enigma of the domestication of cattle? What generated the revolutionary social change that ended the Upper Palaeolithic?
David Lewis-Williams's previous book, The Mind in the Cave, dealt with the remarkable Upper Palaeolithic paintings, carvings, and engravings of western Europe. Here Dr. Lewis-Williams and David Pearce examine the intricate web of belief, myth, and society in the succeeding Neolithic period, arguably the most significant turning point in all human history, when agriculture became a way of life and the fractious society that we know today was born.
The authors focus on two contrasting times and places: the beginnings in the Near East, with its mud-brick and stone houses each piled on top of the ruins of another, and western Europe, with its massive stone monuments more ancient than the Egyptian pyramids.
They argue that neurological patterns hardwired into the brain help explain the art and society that Neolithic people produced. Drawing on the latest research, the authors skillfully link material on human consciousness, imagery, and religious concepts to propose provocative new theories about the causes of an ancient revolution in cosmology and the origins of social complexity. In doing so they create a fascinating neurological bridge to the mysterious thought-lives of the past and reveal the essence of a momentous period in human history. 100 illustrations, 20 in color.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Decent research, but not useful. June 26, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Speculation, conjecture, supposition, and thin hypotheses. Not to mention occasionally misleading in its assertions. You would learn more by re-reading C.J. Jung's classic works on the same subject matter and then re-read some of Mircea Eliade's own excellent and well-regarded work. This text makes me think more of Joseph Campbell's musings.
When the authors do venture out of the realm of occasionally entertaining and sometimes New Age style 'what if?' discussions, their source analyses and conclusions are at least worth consideration. However, I spent too much time trying to find some of their terms in dictionaries (which turned out to be entirely idiosyncratic words for the authors) than I did in thoughtful contemplation of their ideas since it was frustrating to try to pry away the fluff-talk and get to the actual information.
This seems to be one of the books that is coming out of a fairly recent trend in archaeology where a vaguely appropriate adjective is applied to 'archaeology' and thereby used to justify so-called 'groundbreaking' or 'cutting edge' research. That in turn usually works out be at least substantially speculative fluff which cannot be adequately proven or disproven, but certainly does help to fill white space on pages.
I finished the book, but I regret the time that I spent on it. It could have been reduced by around 100 pages and become a much better book.
 A sequence that doesn't match the original June 27, 2007
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book is the sequence of the excelent Mind In the Cave book. But this book isn't so good than the original. Some points of view seems forced and don't have the same appeal that the original's ones.
 Bringing the gods home. March 1, 2007
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
If anything jars your sensitivities, it's the claim that your brain is driving you instead of the other way around. Yet, many cognitive studies suggest that's often precisely the case. If David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce are correct, then mentally-driven activities have contributed to the making of many social conditions. One of those conditions, a universal which provides support for their thesis, is religion. The definition of "religion" has been subjected to some drastic changes lately. It's been broadened to encompass many "spiritual" themes. Today's spiritual movements tend to hark back to earlier, simpler modes. The authors assert that some of these can be traced to the Neolithic period in Europe and Western Asia.
Using the recent finds of archaeology and the cognitive sciences, the authors postulate that Neolithic society developed the foundations of religion. Moreover, religion pre-dated the adoption of agriculture and husbandry. Archaeology has revealed sites in Asia Minor suggesting that hunter-gatherer groups built shrines, seasonally visited for ritual purposes. Communities grew around these shrines and agriculture was developed to support them. The shrines marked a departure from earlier practices of dealing with the spirit realm in caves, represented by such sites as Lascaux and Chauvet as described in Lewis-William's previous book, "The Mind In the Cave" [2002]. The above-ground shrines allowed greater community participation and a new social structure. One aspect of that change was the burial of heads beneath the floors of houses. Some of the corpses may indicate more than just ancestral burial, and represent sacrifices. Was spiritual power derived from those buried heads, the authors query?
In moving communication with spirits out of caves and involving more of the community, religious figures - shamans - assumed a different role in society. The authors note that all religions possess an ecstatic component, and nearly every individual has experienced various forms of altered consciousness. From this, the authors postulate "the consciousness contract" in which those who could experience and interpret the results of altered consciousness rose to become religious and community leaders. Instead of waiting for visions to occur, the shamans came to prompt them through physical exertion or psychotropic drugs. Thus supercharged, the visions seemed more intense, hence, more meaningful. Even if the community shared but a lower-level version of the visions, they were sufficiently aware of them to understand what the shamans described. What was already lodged in the mind emerged with greater force and wider acceptance.
Group activities reached peaks of drama and expression with the establishment of burial sites and stone shrines in Western Europe and the British Isles. Although the best known today, Stonehenge is but a small facet of what belief produced in shrines and burial places. Lewis-Williams and Pearce provide an impressive guided tour of the sites, their structure and arrangement. There is a good deal here to indicate how altered states of consciousness can be transformed into the physical world. Spirals, for example, often seen by those in trance or other altered states, are a fundamental component of many burial and shrine sites. The illustrations, including colour plates, depict these and other manifestations to greatly enhance an already vivid text. Although, the reader's preconceptions about religion or early societies may be challenged, but they will have no difficulty in understanding the evidence or conclusions the authors provide. A truly stimulating and provocative book, well worth the time and investment to understand thoroughly. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Compelling, thought provoking, and yet understated February 14, 2007
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
It wasn't until having completed this book and put it away when I realized the full impact of it's narrative. Mostly, because it is so understated. It's speculations about the Neolithic psyche are compelling and with the reminder that we can't underestimate in our secular world-view the interweaving of altered-states, cosmological beliefs, and eventual early human advancements. For example, we like to think of early domestication as a reasoned development to provide easy availability of food, milk and hides. Yet, it is likely, if not highly probable that domestication of aurochs, for example, was a product of a dominating supernatural cosmology. To quote the authors, "The associated assumption that rational decision-making and processes, such as sensible adaptation to the environment, can account for all past human behaviour is groundless. It imputes contemporary Western values to past societies. We must be more alert to the irrationality of the past (and of the present.)"
The main thesis of this book is that altered-states of consciousness and our beliefs in and attempts to control supposed supernatural forces may have played a significant role in some major technological advancements from the Neolithic age. Moreover, these altered state experiences are not only central to the development of religious beliefs, but are also neurologically hard-wired into our central nervous systems. The archeological evidence and arguments are worth the effort of understanding, if just to get a speculative glimpse of the Neolithic world. What is less convincing, however, is the scant neurological backing the authors provide. This is one of the major shortfalls of this book.
Still, the argument that stayed with me was the one suggesting that religion as we know it entails an often unquestioning belief in the supernatural and supernatural forces, and this belief, albeit universal across the peoples and across the ages, is a misreading of what is simply our own neurological processes. Our march as a species is toward giving up our superstitions, our beliefs in the supernatural, and recognizing them for what they are -- anachronistic resonances from the neolithic mind. The authors end with the question, "Is it possible to have a religion that does not entail a belief in the supernatural?" If you have an interest in religion, human prehistory, and even cognitive psychology I'd highly recommend this book. If you are coming at it with an interest in neuroscience, however, you'll be more than likely disappointed in its offerings.
Simply the best January 3, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Simply the best introduction to new, often ground-breaking research on Neolithic Mind on the market today. Well written and well illustrated it is the follow-up to the highly acclaimed "The Mind in the Cave" by David Lewis-Williams, which dealt with remarkable Upper Paleolithic art depicted by Shamans on the walls of caves. "Inside the Neolithic Mind" applies a neuropsychological model of altered states of consciousness to explain cosmology and architecture of famous Catalhoyuk in Turkey, one of the first cities people founded, and monumental, mysterious tombs in Ireland.
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