| Product Summary |
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| Warrior Women, by Jeannine Davis-Kimball with Mona Behan |
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Warrior Women |
| Pros |
• Inspirational for amateurs in ancient history and archaeology.
• Brings the ancient and modern steppes to life.
• Davis-Kimball, writing for a general audience, assumes little background knowledge. |
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| Cons |
• Relies on popularized Ancient Greek history.
• Lacks a much needed, detailed geography lesson.
• Loses focus. |
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| The Bottom Line - A two-pronged book that looks at the life of a modern archaeologist and at the heritage of ancient women who wielded power in their communities. |
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| Product Description |
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After completing her education in her early fifties, Jeannine Davis-Kimball set out on the variously frightening, boring, difficult, and physically challenging, but exciting work of an archaeologist exploring areas of what was then the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviet Block, Kimball-Davis continued her excavation and discovery work in Communist China where the Caucasian mummies and textiles point to an early link with western Europe. |
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Kimball-Davis was compelled to go beyond the accepted stories to unearth underlying, defiant truths. In one case, the ancient corpse she encountered had been beheaded -- recently. Because the body was obviously someone of power, and the head would have proven its gender, Kimball-Davis thinks the head may have been removed to preserve the illusion of male dominance in the region. |
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Kimball-Davis, who spent months living and working among the natives of the steppes (including descendants of the tribe of Genghis Khan), looks at the ancient rise and fall of the Mongols, and provides a rare glimpse at the recent history and life of the steppes' nomads. If you've ever wondered how the Turkish and Hungarian languages came to be related, Warrior Women will supply an answer. |
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| Guide Review |
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The ancient land of the Silk Road and Mongols, Sauromatians, Sarmatians, and Scythians, the steppes, spans almost a third of the world's land mass. This is the area art historian and archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball set out to explore. Motivated by skepticism and concerned that women were being given short shrift in traditional accounts, Kimball-Davis wanted to examine the material evidence of women's status.
Kimball-Davis found that women priestesses, warriors, and hearth women were given positions of prominence in burial mounds and depicted in cave paintings as substantially larger and more powerful than men. But she found no physical evidence for a tribe of women warriors living independently of men like the legendary Amazons.
Want a second opinion? Kris Hirst of the Archaeology page at About also reviewed Warrior Women.
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