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 dancing are among the oldest and most
persistent themes in Near Eastern 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 archaeological objects from the Near East, southeastern Europe,
and Egypt to offer the first comprehensive look at the role of dance in
these Neolithic (7000-4000 BC) societies. In the first part of the book,
Garfinkel examines the structure of dance, its functional roles in the
community (with comparisons to dance in modern pre-state societies), and
its cognitive, or symbolic, aspects. This analysis leads him to assert
that scenes of dancing depict real community rituals linked to the
agricultural cycle and that dance was essential for maintaining these
calendrical rituals and passing them on to succeeding generations. In
the concluding section of the book, Garfinkel presents and discusses the
extensive archaeological data--some 400 depictions of dance--on which
his study is based.
