It’s August 2015. After twenty-five years of archaeological research in a secluded cave overlooking the Rhône Valley in southern France, Ludovic Slimak uncovers the remains of a Neanderthal, frozen in time – a discovery that casts fresh light on a...

For nearly two thousand years, Hebrew belonged to the realm of the sacred. A written liturgical language used primarily by rabbis and scholars, it was not spoken in everyday contexts. A revival process in the late nineteenth century brought Hebrew back...

Though his work was little known outside Italian intellectual circles for most of the twentieth century, anthropologist and historian of religions Ernesto de Martino is now recognized as one of the most original thinkers in the field. This book is...

In essays covering everything from art and common sense to charisma and constructions of the self, the eminent cultural anthropologist and author of The Interpretation of Cultures deepens our understanding of human societies through the intimacies of...

Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial...

An original study of empire creation and its consequences, from ancient through early modern timesThe world’s first great empires established by the ancient Persians, Chinese, and Romans are well known, but not the empires that emerged on their margins...

Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews."The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make...

In 1997 and early 1998, one of the most powerful El Niños ever recorded disrupted weather patterns all over the world. Europe suffered through a record freeze as the American West was hit with massive floods and snowstorms; in the western Pacific,...

“In the modern tradition of Big Books of human history like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, Goliath’s Curse provides a novel theory of civilizational development. . . . [It] feels something like...

From the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C., a spellbinding account of the archaeological find that opened a window onto the vibrant diplomatic world of the ancient Near EastIn 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the...

From the author of the international bestseller Schott's Original Miscellany comes a visually rich book that breaks down the colorful language and systems of signs that make up the vocabulary of our world. Here is an obsessive and fascinating look at...

The first book to explore from an archaeological perspective the incredible and improbable history of our relationship with cats, from fearsome foe to purring pet. Feared, revered and respected, cats have left an indelible pawprint on the histories and...

Established as the best single-volume introduction to Andean art and architecture, this wide-ranging survey describes, among others, the strikingly varied artistic achievements of the Chavín, Paracas, Moche, Nasca, Chimú and Inca cultures. Their...

This delightful tale of one of the world's favorite foods draws on botany, archaeology, and culinary history to present a complete and accurate history of chocolate. It begins some 4,000 years ago in the jungles of Mexico and Central America with the...

WINNER OF THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTIONA TIME 10 Best Nonfiction Book of 2024 • An NPR Book We Love 2024 • A New York Times Notable Book of 2024 • A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024“A work of extraordinary reportage and compassion...[it] will...

In the 1100s most Pueblo peoples lived in small, dispersed settlements and moved frequently, but by the mid-1400s they had aggregated into large villages. The majority of these villages were still occupied at Spanish contact and conquest, by which time...

From teddy bears and Winnie-the-Pooh to Smokey Bear, Yogi Bear, and Cocaine Bear, American popular culture has been fascinated with real and fictional bears for more than two centuries. Bears are ubiquitous, appearing in advertisements, as logos for...

Fear of a Dead White Planet asks: How does one study when the planet is on fire? The More Worlds Collective challenges the contemporary rush to planetary technofixes for environmental emergency. Instead, it tracks how such planetary-science frames are...