What do walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and
writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines.
In this extraordinary book Tim Ingold imagines a world in which everyone
and everything consists of interwoven or interconnected lines and lays
the foundations for a completely new discipline: the anthropological
archaeology of the line.
Ingold's argument leads us through the music of Ancient Greece and
contemporary Japan, Siberian labyrinths and Roman roads, Chinese
calligraphy and the printed alphabet, weaving a path between antiquity
and the present. Drawing on a multitude of disciplines including
archaeology, classical studies, art history, linguistics, psychology,
musicology, philosophy and many others, and including more than seventy
illustrations, this book takes us on an exhilarating intellectual
journey that will change the way we look at the world and how we go
about in it.
This Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by the author.