The ten participants in this volume explore non-representational patterns from perceptual and cultural perspectives. Archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and psychologists lend their views on how patterns and symmetry are expressed and resonate in a variety of human relationships and institutions. The authors reveal how symmetric relationships in human visual, verbal, and kinesthetic manifestations are integral to cultural identity. Diane Humphrey uses developmental studies of children and adults to explore how humans learn to recognise and reproduce symmetry. Michael Kubovny and...

These fourteen original essays accept a dual premise: technology pervades and is embedded in all human activities. By taking that approach, studies of technology address two questions central in anthropological and archaeological research today-accounting for variability and change. These diverse yet interrelated chapters show that to understand human lives, researchers must deal with the material world that all peoples create and inhabit. Therefore an anthropology of technology is not a separate, discrete inquiry; instead, it is a way to connect how people make and use things to any activity...