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Department of Anthropology

Supplementary Readings for Additional Information

 

ANTH 140: Nonwestern Contributions to the Western World                       Spring 2006

Richard W. Franke                                                                           Professor of Anthropology

franker@mail.montclair.edu                                                                   Back to Franke’s Page

 

The course syllabus is online at http://chss.montclair.edu/anthro/ANTH140spring2006.htm

Link to the Recommended Websites with Additional Information

Link to the Weatherford Review Questions

 

TOPICS AND SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS OF RELIABLE QUALITY

 

1. Introduction: Why This Course?

 

 

 

 

General Reading with Many Interesting Pieces of Information:

 

Panati, Charles. 1987. Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things. New York: Harper and Row.

 

 

Teresi, Dick. 2002. Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science — from the Babylonians to the Maya. New York: Simon and Schuster.

   

   The Concepts of Western and Nonwestern

 

Suggested readings about the battle of Thermopylae (Thermopylae means "hot gates"):

  • Andrew R. Burn, Persia and the Greeks. The Defence of the West, c.546-478 B.C. (1962 London) pages 342-363, 378-381, 406-422
  • N.G.L. Hammond, 'The expedition of Xerxes', in: the Cambridge ancient history, 2nd ed, vol.4, pages 518-590
  • C. Hignett, Xerxes' invasion of Greece (1963, Oxford), pages 113-148 and 356-378 (especially 371-378)
  • Bradford, Ernle. 1980. The Battle for the West: Thermopylae. New York: McGraw-Hill. A non-academic account of the battle in tremendous detail.

2.    Ethnocentrism—What It Is and Why Anthropologists Reject It.

 

3. Racism—the Genetic Version of Ethnocentrism and Why Anthropologists Reject It

 

Patterson, Thomas C. 1997. Inventing Western Civilization. New York: Monthly Review Press. An archaeologist summarizes the history of racism and ethnocentrism along with comments on Europeans who rejected both.

 

Montagu, Ashley. 1997. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press. 6th edition. The definitive encyclopedia of theories of racial superiority/inferiority and the biological and genetic refutations of them.

 

Childe, V. Gordon. 1951. Man Makes Himself. New York: Mentor Books. An archaeologist of the Near East offers a theory of “progress” based on the extensive archaeological record from that region.

 

 

4. Indian Silver and Gold on the World Market: How Native Americans Fueled the Modern Economy

 

5.    Indian Contributions to Industrial Development

 

6.    The Foods Native Americans Gave Us

 

 

 

 

Foster, Nelson, and Linda S. Cordell, eds. 1992. Chilies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.                    

 

7.    The Columbian Exchange

 

 

 

Crosby, Alfred W. Jr. 1972. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. The book that inspired the video.

 

 

8.    Farming Technology from the Indians

 

Weatherford, Jack. 1991. Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America. New York: Fawcett Columbine. More details on the topics first taken up in Indian Givers.

 

 

 

Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang. Where the Europeans saw a wilderness with savages, modern ecological studies find a managed environment.

 

 

 

Williams, Michael. 1988. Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 2 -- "The forest and the Indian" -- pages 22-49 -- describes the many ways Native Americans managed the forests of North America. Surprises galore await the reader of this text.

 

 

 

Thornton, Russell. 1987.  American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Surveys the various estimates of the native population of the New World at the time of European contact. The population figures play an important role in the debate over the extent of Indian forest management described in the Williams book just above.

 

 

Wolkomir, Richard. 1995. Bringing ancient ways to our farmers' fields. Smithsonian 26(8):99-107. November 1995. Describes the work of Iroquois agronomist Jane Mt. Pleasant of Cornell University who is studying the environmental and agricultural output consequences of the Iroquois "three sisters" system of corn, beans and squash that preserve soil fertility.

 

9.    Native American Medicines That Still Save Our Lives or Ease Our Pain

 

Arvigo, Rosita, and Michael Balick. 1993. Rainforest Remedies: One Hundred Healing Herbs of Belize. Twin Lakes, Wisconsin: Lotus Press. The plants, their names, drawings, and the healing properties as claimed by traditional Maya healers and as being investigated by modern science.

 

 

 

Densmore, Frances. 1974 [orig. 1928]. How the Indians Use Wild Plants for Food, Medicien and Crafts. New York: Dover Publications.

 

 

Herrick, James W. 1995. Iroquois Medical Botany. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

10.          The Native American Contribution to American Democracy: a Debate

Grinde, Donald A., Jr. 1977. The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation. San Francisco: The Indian Historian Press. A Yamasee Native American historian’s account of the role of the Iroquois constitution in shaping American settler concepts of democracy and the American constitution. Includes a complete English text of The Council of the Great Peace of Dekanawidah.

 

A debate about Grinde's work and that of colleague Bruce Johansen, appears in the following three sources (thanks to MSU History Prof. Robert Cray for these citations):

Levy, Philip. 1996. Exemplars of taking liberties: the Iroquois influence thesis and the problem of evidence. The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 53(3):588–604.

 

Payne, Samuel B. Jr. 1996. The Iroquois League, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 53(3):605–20.

 

Grinde, Donald A. Jr. and Bruce E. Johansen. 1996. Sauce for the goose: demand and definitions for "proof" regarding the Iroquois and democracy. The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 53(3):621–35.

11.  Peru and the Incas—Mathematical and Scientific Achievements

Moseley, Michael E. 1992. The Incas and Their Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru. London. Thames and Hudson. Best overall introduction to the Incas and their ancestors.

 

 

Bauer, Brian S., and David S. P. Dearborn. 1995. Astronomy and Empire in the Ancient Andes: The Cultural Origins of Inca Sky Watching. Austin: University of Texas Press. An astrophysicist combines with an archaeologist to unravel the impressive level of Inca astronomical knowledge.

 

 

Patterson, Tomas C. 1991. The Inca Empire: The Formation and Disintegration of a Pre-Capitalist State. New York: Berg. History and social structure of the Inca empire.

 

 

Zuidema, R. Tom. 1990. Inca Civilization in Cuzco. Austin: University of Texas Press. Translated from the French by Jean-Jacques Decoster. Details of Inca astronomy, architecture, surveying knowledge, and their calendar.

 

 

Peruvian Weaving—a Continuous Warp for 5,000 years. [Sprague Library Video #4010]. Archaeologists trace one of the oldest known textile processing traditions.

12. Pre-Inca Achievements; The Lines at Nazca

 

 

Aveni, Anthony. 2000. Nasca: Eighth Wonder of the World? London: British Museum Press. Overview of 80 years of scientific and non-scientific attempts to explain the lines and drawings of Nazca.

14. Maya Astronomy and Mathematics

 

15. Lessons from the Ancestors: The Chimu and Maya Collapses and Their Implications for Today

Click here for the Spring 2006 Handout on Lessons from the Ancestors 

 

 

 

Gill, Richardson B. 2000. The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life, and Death. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Argues that the Maya died in great numbers from a series of massive droughts during the century from 800 AD to 900 AD.

16. The Non-European Origins of Writing

Before the Alphabet [Sprague Library Video #2299]. The history of pre-alphabetic writing as revealed by Sumerian and Egyptian tablets in the Louvre Museum of Paris. The narration is in English.

 

 

Zauzich, Karl-Theodor. [1980] 1992. Hieroglyphs Without Mystery: An Introduction to Ancient Egyptian Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press. Translated and adapted for English-speaking readers by Ann Macy Roth. A beginner’s guide to Egyptian writing.

 

 

 

 

Parkinson, Richard, and Stephen Quirke. 1995. Papyrus. Austin: University of Texas Press. Technology of the world’s oldest major paper-making tradition. 

17. Egypt: The Geographical and Historical Background

      

 

 

18. Scientific and Architectural, and Mathematical Achievements of Ancient Egypt

Gillings, Richard J. 1972. Mathematics in the Time of the Pharaohs. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. A complete guide to ancient Egyptian math including the problem and solution sets of several famous papyrus documents. Includes description of how the Egyptians derived the ancient world's most accurate estimate of the value of pi.

19. Egyptian Medicine: Forerunner of Modern Knowledge

 

 

Allen, James P. 2005. The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press. Published in conjunction with the exhibition “The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt,” held at the MMA New York from September 13, 2005 to January 15, 2006.

 

 

 

Mininberg, David T. 2006. Gallery lecture on The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt. 10 January 2006.

 

 

 

Nunn, John F. 1996. Ancient Egyptian Medicine. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press by special arrangement with the British Museum Press.

 

 

 

 

 

20. The Pyramids

 

 

 

 

 

 

21. Egyptian Contributions? The Black Athena Debate

 

 

 

 

Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. The book that started the recent debate over Egyptian influences on Greek science and mathematics. Vol. 1 is mainly an intellectual history of Europe and North America during the years specified in the title, emphasizing how racism and anti-Semitism led to changing views of Greek civilization.

 

Vol. 2. 1991. The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. Mostly archaeological data on recent discoveries suggesting Egyptian influences and possibly even conquest of parts of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages. These data form much of the controversy shown in the video in class.

 

Vol. 3. Planned for sometime in the future, to deal primarily with linguistic data Bernal claims show that many of the non-Indoeuropean words in Greek can be explained from the ancient Egyptian or Canaanite languages. (Hebrew is a dialect of Canaanite.)

 

Lefkowitz, Mary. 1996. Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. New York: Basic Books. A strong attack on Afrocentrism that treats Bernal’s Black Athena hypothesis as a version of Afrocentrism.

 

Moore, David Chioni, ed. 2001. Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Pages 2–11 give a summary of the Black Athena argument. See pages 373–95 for a direct response to Mary Lefkowitz’s book (above). Many of the other essays are highly technical.

 

Optional Readings on Afrocentrism:

Diop, Cheikh Anta. 1974 [orig. 1967]. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality? Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Translated by Mercer Cook. The book by a Senegalese scientist that launched the modern Afrocentric movement.

 

Asante, Molefi Kete. 1987. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. A view of Afrocentrism that goes beyond Diop’s original ideas.

 

22. VIDEO: The Lost City of Zimbabwe [Sprague Library Video #3034]

 

23. Serer Ecology—How to Preserve the Environment; Fulani Medicine and the Origins of Vaccination; Scientific knowledge and political organization in the West African empires of Ghana, Songhay, and Mali.

 

24.  African Influences on American English

 

Vass, Winifred Kellersberger. 1979. The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States. Los Angeles: University of California Center for Afro-American Studies. Afro-American Culture and Society Monograph Series. Volume 2.

 

25. African Gifts to Western Music:

 

 

 

Floyd, Samuel A. Jr. 1995. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

 

 

26. African Mathematics: Some of the Earliest Known Human Number Systems

 

27. African Architecture and Design

 

      

28. Black Rice – How Africans Taught European Settlers in North America to grow the first plantation crop.

 

Carney, Judith A. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The book on which the powerpoint show is based.

      29.Chinese Mathematical Achievements, Alchemy, and the Origins of Gunpowder

 

 

30. Chinese Medicine and Anatomical Knowledge

 

 

 

 

 

31. Yoga and Ayurveda: Ancient India’s Modern Medicine

 

 

 

32. Coffee: An Afro-Arabic Gift to the World

 

Pendergrast, Mark. 1999. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. New York: Basic Books.

 

If you wish to read my advice about how to study more effectively, or wish to see examples of the kinds of questions typically found on exams for this course, take a look at:

 

Franke, Richard W. 1998. The Anthropology Student Guide to Better Grades. Department of Anthropology. Third edition. http://chss2.montclair.edu/anthropology/bettergrades.htm

 

 

 

 

 

Link to the Recommended Websites with Additional Information

Link to the Weatherford Review Questions