Regular marked price: $26.95Discount Price: $19.14
Cost Savings: $7.81 (29%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.4209
EAN num: 9780061170911
ISBN number: 0061170917
Label: Collins
Manufacturer: Collins
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: February 01, 2007
Publishing house: Collins
Release Date: February 06, 2007
Sale Popularity Level: 209516
Studio: Collins
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Shaped by cartoons and museum dioramas, our vision of Paleolithic times tends to feature fur-clad male hunters fearlessly attacking mammoths while timid women hover fearfully behind a boulder. In fact, recent research has shown that this vision bears little relation to reality.
The field of archaeology has changed dramatically in the past two decades, as women have challenged their male colleagues' exclusive focus on hard artifacts such as spear points rather than tougher to find evidence of women's work. J. M. Adovasio and Olga Soffer are two of the world's leading experts on perishable artifacts such as basketry, cordage, and weaving. In The Invisible Sex, the authors present an exciting new look at prehistory, arguing that women invented all kinds of critical materials, including the clothing necessary for life in colder climates, the ropes used to make rafts that enabled long-distance travel by water, and nets used for communal hunting. Even more important, women played a central role in the development of language and social life—in short, in our becoming human. In this eye-opening book, a new story about women in prehistory emerges with provocative implications for our assumptions about gender today.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
I am impressed by the work of J.M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page in their innovative investigation of the work of pre-historic women. While they don't always agree with one another, the authors are always cordial and witty. The result is a book that tells a lot about women in prehistoric times, and a bit about the collaborative process of writing THE INVISIBLE SEX: UNCOVERING THE TRUE ROLES OF WOMEN IN PREHISTORY. The study is published by Smithsonian Books, under the aegis of Harper Collins, 2007.
Growing and preparing food, working with fibers to create cord, birthing babies, honoring higher powers by carving goddess figures, fashioning tools: all these important aspects of communal life, as it was lived by women in collaboration with men, have been scientifically investigated and cleverly written, sometimes in story form, always in an engaging narrative style.
Two of the authors are scientists, and one a journalist. It is a dynamic combination, and their book a fascinating read.
Rated by buyers 
-
As an academic, I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but I wish the book were about 1/4 as long as it is. I understand and appreciate the need to include the evidence in detail, but I would have gleaned much more had the authors made their points more succinctly. Or maybe it would have helped if they had included a summary of their main points at the end -- or even the beginning -- of each chapter. Two of their main points are not new: (1) that human history has been written by men and therefore with a male bias, and (2) archaeology is less likely to uncover evidence of women's tools, because so many do not survive like instruments traditionally attributed to men's work. As a professor of the psychology of women, I anticipated learning something exciting and new. The authors are apparently excellent researchers and evaluators of hypotheses, but I was not as excited by the content as the title had led me to hope.
Rated by buyers 
-
As an anthropologist and a meticulous proofreader/copyeditor, I am dismayed at the poor quality of this publication from Smithsonian Books. When I very first saw the book, I was excited, as we need a good solid book on this topic. The Invisible Sex does not serve. I suspect that Adovasio and Soffer talked to Jake Page, and he mostly 'wrote' the prose, and that no one familiar with the field (or good at proofreading) looked at the page proofs. Otherwise, some of the more ridiculous statments would never have made it into print. For example, "A scientific theory can be proved" (p. 29) and "There are in fact no truly scientific theories about [the evolution of language], for the very reason that any proposed theory is impossible to prove, meaning it is not a scientific theory." (p. 103). The authors claim that Taung was found by Raymond Dart (p. 39), and state that the foramen magnum is the lower part of the skull "where the backbone meets the skull" (p. 56) -- to these, my response is, "Um, NO." A theory is only scientific if it can be DISPROVEN (not proven), Raymond Dart did not find the Taung skull at the quarry himself, and the foramen magnum is, literally, a BIG HOLE, not a "part" of the skull. The explanation of Karen Rosenberg and Wenda Trevathan's work on human birth is completely botched (p. 65-71); a newborn's fontanelle is not formed by the forces of labor/delivery; Trevathan's last name is misspelled in the book and index, and she teaches at New Mexico State University (not UNM), while Karen Rosenberg teaches at the University of Delaware (not the University of Maryland). And this doozy from p. 91: "Genes are themselves made up of base pairs of amino acids." Um, NO. Elsewhere Acheulian is misspelled, as is Orrorin tugenensis and Wernicke's area of the brain, along with many other misspellings and inconsistencies in names. Sydney is the name of the city in Australia (not Sidney), 'without rhythm' is "arrhythmically" not arhythmically (p. 210); canines and incisors should not be confused with one another(p. 139), diminution is the correct spelling (not "dimunition)," and the Grandmother Hypothesis is incorrectly described (p. 164). One can't see the Thames from Boxgrove. A world with fluctuating seasonal resources is not "bipolar" (p. 212). On p. 172 & 259, the author's fundamental misunderstanding of the weaning process is made clear by their description of a mother 'weaning' her 4 year old onto a soft boiled mush of wild seeds. When people write of 'weaning gruels,' they are referring to the very very first non-breast milk foods a child gets at age 6-8 months; they are not using the term 'weaning' to mean the end of breastfeeding at age 4 years or older. A four year old child is very likely still breastfeeding, but they also have 20 teeth with which to eat all solid adult foods. Just as a modern human child might go to morning kindergarten, get a Happy Meal lunch on the way home, and then nurse to sleep for a nap. The more serious flaw of the book, however, is the authors ongoing confusion between/among sex, gender, and sexual orientation. On p. 277, they refer to three genders: "male, female, and gay." The very first two are biological sex categories, and the third is an American English term for a particular sexual orientation. Genders consiste of masculine, feminine, and a number of others, depending on the culture. "Manly-Hearted Women" were uber-females, married to men, not lesbians. One expects people who study sex and gender in prehistory to understand the distinctions! The bibliography is a complete disaster, with many references having missing or incorrect information. Again, it obviously was not proofread by anyone. Shame on Smithsonian Books for publishing this in such bad shape. The Invisible Sex does not in any way uncover the "true roles" of women in prehistory -- gender does not preserve in the archaeological record, no matter how much we may wish it did. In addition to the Hopi, across West Africa, adult males do the weaving and sewing. Even though in most cultures weaving is women's work, we shouldn't make ANY assumptions about the chromosomes, internal anatomy, external genitalia, sexual orientation, or cultural gender constructions of the individuals who wove cloth, who made baskets, who made stone tools, who hunted, and/or who gathered. We know the women got pregnant, gave birth, and breastfed the children. That's about all we can know. The Invisible Sex is archeological story-telling from a perspective which I vastly prefer over the "Man the Hunter"/Owen Lovejoy perspective, but it is still just archeological story-telling.
Rated by buyers -
J.M. Adovasio is an archaeologist. Olga Soffer is an anthropologist, and Jake Page is a science writer. They have put together in "The Invisible Sex" a book that attempts to
(1) Bring the general reader up to date on the latest developments in archaeology or paleo-anthropology;
(2) Uncover the True Roles of Women in Prehistory (as in the subtitle); and
(3) Provide a corrective to a male-dominated view of the prehistory.
The main image they want to correct is that of the great male hunter bravely slaying mastodons and in general bringing home the bacon to an adoring and appreciative family or band. What the authors want readers to see is that women weren't just tag-alongs on the way to our becoming fully modern humans, but at least equal partners. The authors refer to nets, threads, garments, basket weaving, cordage, digging sticks, the famous "Venus" statuettes, and other cultural artifacts to demonstrate the enormous role that women played culturally. They speculate that women invented farming, that they too engaged in the hunt, as well as producing works of art as important as the famous cave paintings.
The main method used by the authors is to infer the past from a study of recent hunter-gatherer societies while comparing ancient artifacts with more recent ones. This method certainly ought to provide insight into human life in prehistory, but of course there are some problems. The main one I think is that the "primitive" societies extant yesterday or in the near past are not necessarily typical of those that existed in prehistory because today's tribes occupy marginal lands since the best lands have long been given over to modern societies.
Personally, I never had any doubt about the significant role females played in the history of the species. Indeed, my feeling has always been that women are the default human being, and men an appendage, a necessary evil if you will. (Ha!) I don't think we need to study archaeology to understand that the central role in human culture is and was occupied by women. There is a sense of pandering and begging the question in the way the authors insist on the obvious. I think it stems from the fact that women in some of the sciences have and still do feel like second class citizens.
But that is changing. As the authors point out, most anthropologists yesterday are women. The old male-delusional interpretations of culture in paleo-societies or in modern gatherer-hunter societies are a thing of the past. Instead we are in danger of having female-delusional interpretations. Here are a couple of examples of "reverse" sexism in the text:
From page 209: The authors imagine that "Aboriginal men" may have sniffed "contemptuously at the shell hooks and...strings that their women were using, making invidious comparisons of those little toys...with their mighty, multipointed, barbed, aerodynamic spears and other large instruments." Actually the men may have looked admiringly at such tools since such tools increased their subsistence.
On pages 248-249 in pre-Columbian New Mexico: While the women were farming, "The men had continued to spend much of their time roaming the surround, hunting (or goofing off?)." I think time spent "goofing off" applies to both sexes.
Frankly I am a bit weary of books that focus on sexualism in one form or the other to the exclusion of the science itself. This book would have been a lot better had the stance been devoid of sexism and just concentrated on what the authors have learned and understand. Their various interpretations of the enigmatic Venus of Willendorf figurine, from goddess to porn star, is a case in point. Clearly the figure, which the authors quite naturally attribute to a female artist, is a symbol in some sense of fertility, not just the fertility of the female, but of the earth itself since no woman could have gotten so corpulent except during a period of plenty. And that is what probably enamored those who made and kept such figures--the idea of the season of plenty. Such a woman not only had plenty to eat, but was a heavy favorite to survive whatever winter may come. Her personal sexuality is secondary to the generalized idea of fertility.
As for bringing the general reader up to date on the latest developments in archaeology or paleo-anthropology, the authors provide some interesting material. What has happened is that because of new technologies and more professional care taken by the scientists themselves, we are now able to unearth and be aware of artifacts such as threads, baskets, nets, etc., in a way previously not possible. And, it is true, it helps to see these artifacts from a woman's point of view, that is, as a gender female looking at what happened and assessing the importance of the artifacts, and drawing conclusions that did not occur to the old guys who once dominated ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Why can't these pop science writers at least try to avoid inserting egregious errors? Towards the end of this book the authors actually say that "linguists and geneticists are coming to the conclusion that the Anatolian hypothesis is correct," and that a 6500 B.C. date for Proto-Indo-European "accords better with the linguistic dating"! That is precisely the opposite of the case. The Anatolian hypothesis is, as Mallory put it, the wrong place at the wrong time. On linguistic grounds it doesn't even begin to stand up, and never has.
Of course the book isn't about Indo-European, and the authors would have done well to stay out of a topic with which they are clearly unfamiliar. Foolish errors like this undermine the book's credibility.
Find other books like this one:
