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    Fossil Legends of the First Americans
    Fossil Legends of the First Americans
    Fossil Legends of the First Americans
    Ebook488 pages9 hours

    Fossil Legends of the First Americans

    By Adrienne Mayor

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The burnt-red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate about their deaths? Did they collect fossils?

    Beginning in the East, with its Ice Age monsters, and ending in the West, where dinosaurs lived and died, this richly illustrated and elegantly written book examines the discoveries of enormous bones and uses of fossils for medicine, hunting magic, and spells. Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct creatures and sought to understand their transformation to stone. In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters. Their insights, some so sophisticated that they anticipate modern scientific theories, were passed down in oral histories over many centuries.

    Drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional accounts, and extensive personal interviews, Adrienne Mayor takes us from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees. Fossil Legends of the First Americans represents a major step forward in our understanding of how humans made sense of fossils before evolutionary theory developed.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateOct 24, 2013
    ISBN9781400849314
    Fossil Legends of the First Americans

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      This book is fantastic. The author expertly weaves together narratives of the pre-colonization Americas, the interactions between indigenous peoples and the "bone hunters" of the 1800s, and her own journey speaking to the people who maintain the knowledge of their cultures. I picked up this book looking for new perspectives about dinosaurs, but also found one more powerful example of how often non-European ideas are dismissed and ridiculed because the "authority" doesn't bother to listen (or even ask). I could not recommend this work more highly.
    • 5/5
      In Fossil Legends, the mysterious lore of the Native Americans is explained in the context of Proto-Science awareness…The vast bone beds scattered across North America needed explanation and understanding...The fantastical creatures in Native American lore are not too far off the mark in their collective imaginings. The Thunderbirds, The Piasa bird, giant snakes and lizards, the monsters of the Navajo…All ways of describing the creatures that were evident in the bone beds scattered here and there. Another example of the ‘Seeds of Truth’ scattered in lore and legend…

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