First published in 1973, this work remains the best place to start for any exploration into what the English ate, when it was consumed, and why they started. As a librarian, Wilson had access to an outstanding collection of cookery books that were given to the University of Leeds's Brotherton Library, and she made great use of them to talk about the "gradual changes and developments in the preparation of foodstuffs in Britain". This is not a cookbook and does not include historical adaptations. Any recipes that are included are there to illustrate a method or ingredient and are written as part of the text. Chapters are arranged by category or type of food. For example, chapter 4 covers "Wild fowl, tame fowl and eggs"; these subjects are then discussed in a chronological fashion, proceeding from the ancients, the Romans, early medieval, etc. Wilson includes a marvelous bibliography and footnotes that can be used to further explore the subject. For a work that is nearly 30 years old, it is still an essential reading and shelf reference volume for culinary and social historians. Any general reader with an interest in British history or social customs would also find it of great value.

This book lays out a system using stones/crystals. It also includes full color photos of them on the inside covers- a major lacking in most books on the subject of crystals. Since the UK & US names differ, you could take it with you to a gem/rock shop to be sure you are getting the right stone or to find a similar colored stone to take its place. The author did tarot readings originally, but now uses a collection of ~150 stones (many duplications with different sizes of the same 32 stones) The author offers a mail-order course: "Working with Crystals"~contact info on her website (The Hypnothink Foundation) *2 ready to go sets are "The Crystal Wisdom Kit" (here @ amazon!) and "The Crystal Arcana" (UK)

My husband is a Floridian who grew up going to the Everglades with his grandfather, grandmother, dad, uncle and cousin "Lucky." He told me a great deal about his experiences and I couldn't really understand until I went there myself and heard some of the stories from family members. They suggested that I read 40 years in the Everglades. I couldn't put it down once I started. It really gave me a feel for what is so important to the men who live and breathe for the Everglades. It made me feel very proud to have experienced some of it and to understand why the Everglades is a special place. It's more than just hunting. It's a way of life. It's getting back to the basics and being aware of everything that is around you. The flicker of a tail, the eyes of a gator, the cypress stands, the swamp cabbage!

Historical romance set in the early 19th century. Also read "Whetstone Walls," the continuation of this thrilling saga.

Please Visit my gtoup and inform the Steiner Education for all humanbeing

These tapes may not be for all readers. But, because the production is so straight-laced and the content is so...precise, it ends up being a great laugh. The production is so professional that it really ends up being a serious language course!

This is the ultimate book about stone rows. It gives an enormous number of facts about them. A no-nonsense scientific hypothesis is given as to what purpose these rows were made and into what categories they can be divided. But it has been written in a very entertaining way, lots of legends are mentioned as well.

In the Axial Iron Age (starting around 600 bce), key individuals-the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, the Buddha, and Confucius-planted seeds that would grow to become Western civilization and classical civilizations of India and China. The origin of most of the core characteristics of civilization as we know it can be traced to developments in this period. Clearly, something important occurred then-some event or events that began a snowballing process of technological invention, social complexification, and the abstraction of human thought patterns-that has continued to this day. Thus, if we want to understand ourselves and our world, it is essential that we give attention to the events that occurred about 2500 years ago.

A new book offers some of the clearest and most refreshing insight into this set of questions than any to date. From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods deserves careful reading by a broad audience. Lerro has read widely and has brought together the very best evidence and thinking on this subject. His book is a grand synthesis that, by illuminating a distant historical epoch, also throws light on the present.

This work has the virtue of stating the author's perspective clearly at the outset. Lerro rejects both the ideology of progress (which holds that cultural change in the direction of increased complexity comes about because of some inherent evolutionary urge within human beings, or because of their efforts to improve their condition) and that of degeneration (which regards the development of civilization as a disaster resulting from greed or other moral lapses). Instead, he embraces the idea of improvised evolution, which holds that social trends are usually neither inevitable nor intended, but are simply responses to necessity-people doing what they must in order to deal with problems like population pressure and resource depletion.

Lerro identifies ten trends in social systems from Paleolithic bands to Iron Age States-

1) Increase in population 2) Increase in size of societies 3) Increase in variety of specialized goods 4) More advanced technology 5) Increase in social complexity 6) Increase in permanent home settlements 7) Increase in control over the biophysical environment 8) Growth in the specialized skills of labor 9) Increase in the proportion of work compared to leisure time for the average person 10) Increase in social differences in material wealth: ownership of property, tools, and people

-and argues that these are "for the most part, the improvised outcomes of history."

Lerro is seeking to describe not just transformations of material culture, but mutations in human thought patterns and religious perspectives as well, and to show how changes in the infrastructure, structure, and superstructure of a society are all bound together.

In the first chapters, Lerro lays the groundwork by describing the differences between magic (the sacred systems common to hunter-gatherer and simple horticultural societies) and religion (which appears in agricultural states): whereas everyone in magical societies sees myths as literally true, the upper classes in religious societies see them as metaphors; in magical traditions, techniques for contacting the sacred dimension emphasize sensory saturation, whereas for upper classes in religious societies sensory austerity is emphasized; sacred experience for magical societies is experiential and practical, while for religious societies it is intellectual (for upper classes) and devotional (for lower classes); for magical groups, transmission of the tradition is oral, while for religions it is by means of written scriptures.

The author then turns to the evolution of politics and economics-discussing stratification, surplus expropriation, and markets-to show how the appearance of the first religions was tied to prior transformations in economy and social structure. In a remarkable chapter titled "Places, Spaces, and Sensuality: Physical Locale and Sense Ratios in the Ancient World," Lerro notes that people in all societies differentiate "place" (sacralized areas of familiarity where needs for structure, security, and familiarity can be satisfied) from "space" (areas between places, or unexplored zones that are usually regarded as secular and objectivised). Lerro argues that people living in pre-Iron-Age magical societies seem to have valued places over spaces, and the proximate senses (touch, taste, smell, and hearing) over the long-distance sense of sight; meanwhile, people in the Axial Iron-Age religious societies tended to devalue place and valued the eye above the other sense organs. "[S]ocial structures have an impact on the organization of the senses," writes Lerro, since "the type of work people do and how much power they have over their work affect which of the senses they use."

In addition to this change in sense ratios, the shift from Stone-Age to Iron-Age economies also seems to have entailed a mutation in humans' experience of self. "Individuals in all cultures, regardless of the level of social complexity, must build a social self," notes Lerro, and to do so entails mastering skills such as distinguishing the inner world from the outer world, learning language, suppressing biological urges, manipulating tools, learning roles, learning to think abstractly, and learning to decipher the codes -beliefs, morals, values, and customs-of society. "But," he argues, "this does not mean that all social selves are the same." The collectivist self of tribal peoples is more interdependent with society and nature, while the individualist self of people in complex societies is more independent, voluntary, contractual, and instrumental.

Clearly, how people think is affected by their material culture. Thus, ultimately, "it is ecological, demographic, technological, economic, and political conditions that determine which cognitive stage is predominant in a society or whether a stage will appear at all. How people reason is an adaptive response to historical transformations, not primarily a maturational unfolding of an individual."

A final virtue of this book that is worth noting: it contains over forty charts that clearly summarize the ideas the author is conveying.

This is an important work that will change the way readers regard civilization and social change. For anyone who believes that history holds keys to understanding the present, From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods should be required reading. --Richard Heinberg rheinberg@ogc.org

Easy read with much to offer for anyone

An excellent book with wonderful pictures, from day-to-day tasks to warfare and elaborate rituals, accompanied by a fair amount of written information. It's a compelling still life of the Dani in the Baliem valley at the time civilization started to gain momentum and changed their way of life forever. Even though it's written mainly for an ethnographical audience, it's very readable and a must for anyone interested in the highland tribes of Irian Jaya and their cultural background.