Material Images of Humans from the Natufian to Pottery Neolithic Periods in the Levant

Description

This book focuses on the ‘un-naturalistic’ iconography of human imagery intuitively regarded as ‘super-natural’. A Darwinian model of the evolution of symbolic culture, the Female Cosmetic Coalitions model, provides theoretical grounding for the earliest androgynous and therianthropic religious representations and provides theoretical confidence as to the long-term survival of symbols. An analogy between simple shapes and human genitalia expresses the fusion of male and female. The background is the transition from hunting and gathering to farming; power relations are presented as changing from an ‘original social contract’ underpinned by female ritual power, to a ‘new social contract’ driven by competing male elites.