The Yanoama are one of the most numerous remaining aboriginal populations of the South American tropical forests, and their large territory constitutes a significant culture region. Although other scholars (anthropologists, geneticists, linguists) have studied this contemporary "neolithic" population, this is the first geographic study of the Yanoama. It is also the only book to focus on the Yanoama highland core area—the Parima massif—and it is the first study to analyze Yanoama horticulture as an integral part of their ecosystem. The author is concerned principally with the spatial dimension as developed in Yanoama culture, with the spatial patterns of functioning systems, and with Yanoama ecology in this highland habitat. The natural environment is viewed, not as a cultural determinant, but as part of the total ecosystem. Livelihood activities constitute a major organizing theme and, among these, gardening receives the most attention. Frequently classified as a nomadic hunter-gatherer group, the Yanoama are found to have a deep-seated horticultural tradition, and many new data on this tradition are presented. As this study reveals, the Yanoama have created and maintained a cultural landscape that bears their distinctive stamp.

Scholars have long worked to identify the names of tribes and other groupings in the Americas, a task made difficult by the sheer number of indigenous groups and the many names that have been passed down only through oral tradition. This book is a compendium of tribal names in all their variants--from North, Central and South America--collected from printed sources. Because most of these original sources reproduced words that had been encountered only orally, there is a great deal of variation. Organized alphabetically, this book collates these variations, traces them to the spellings and forms that have become standardized, and supplies see and see also references. Each main entry includes tribal name, the "parent group" or ancestral tribe, original source for the tribal name, and approximate location of the name in the original source material.

One of the world's leading specialists in Indo-European religion and society, Bruce Lincoln expresses in these essays his severe doubts about the existence of a much-hypothesized prototypical Indo-European religion. Written over fifteen years, the essays—six of them previously unpublished—fall into three parts. Part I deals with matters "Indo-European" in a relatively unproblematized way, exploring a set of haunting images that recur in descriptions of the Otherworld from many cultures. While Lincoln later rejects this methodology, these chapters remain the best available source of data for the topics they address. In Part II, Lincoln takes the data for each essay from a single culture area and shifts from the topic of dying to that of killing. Of particular interest are the chapters connecting sacrifice to physiology, a master discourse of antiquity that brought the cosmos, the human body, and human society into an ideologically charged correlation. Part III presents Lincoln's most controversial case against a hypothetical Indo-European protoculture. Reconsidering the work of the prominent Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumézil, Lincoln argues that Dumézil's writings were informed and inflected by covert political concerns characteristic of French fascism. This collection is an invaluable resource for students of myth, ritual, ancient societies, anthropology, and the history of religions. Bruce Lincoln is professor of humanities and religious studies at the University of Minnesota.

Conference report on development projects, environmental dangers, agricultural production and agroforestry by indigenous peoples and historical change in the Amazonia river basin, Brazil - considers the impact of development projects on the living conditions of Andean Indian tribes, negative effects of deforestation, hydrologycal aspects of rainforest in the central Amazon tropical zone, etc.; includes a historical survey of the rubber boom. Bibliography, diagrams, maps, photographs, references, statistical tables.

There is no question that native cultures in the New World exhibit many forms of mathematical development. This Native American mathematics can best be described by considering the nature of the concepts found in a variety of individual New World cultures. Unlike modern mathematics in which numbers and concepts are expressed in a universal mathematical notation, the numbers and concepts found in native cultures occur and are expressed in many distinctive ways. Native American Mathematics, edited by Michael P. Closs, is the first book to focus on mathematical development indigenous to the New World. Spanning time from the prehistoric to the present, the thirteen essays in this volume attest to the variety of mathematical development present in the Americas. The data are drawn from cultures as diverse as the Ojibway, the Inuit (Eskimo), and the Nootka in the north; the Chumash of Southern California; the Aztec and the Maya in Mesoamerica; and the Inca and Jibaro of South America. Among the strengths of this collection are this diversity and the multidisciplinary approaches employed to extract different kinds of information. The distinguished contributors include mathematicians, linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists.