 Dancing at the dawn of agriculture.
Author: Garfinkel, Yosef Published: 2003 As the nomadic hunters and gatherers of the ancient Near East turned to agriculture for their livelihood and settled into villages, religious ceremonies involving dancing became their primary means for bonding individuals into communities and households into villages. So important was dance that scenes of dance are among the oldest and most persistent themes in prehistoric art, and these depictions of dance accompanied the spread of agriculture into surrounding regions of Europe and Africa. In this pathfinding book, Yosef Garfinkel analyzes depictions of dancing found on archaelogical objects from the Near East, southeastern Europe, and Egypt to offer the first comprehensive look at the role of dance in Neolithic societies. | 
