ABSTRACT
French prehistorian Jacques Cauvin concluded, the Neolithic Revolution signalled an entirely new "mental attitude", a dramatically altered relationship between human beings and the natural world. In the natural world they lived, even if, on a regular basis, they felt the need to call upon gods and goddesses to help them through the travails of this new mode of existence. Barbara Bender the Marxist archaeologist argued that Lewis Binford and the New Archaeologists had overlooked the social complexity and sophistication that Upper Paleolithic peoples must have achieved over the long course of human evolution. Peter Wilson, who published a book entitled The Domestication of the Human Species, traced the roots of human sedentism back to our evolutionary heritage as primates, and particularly the highly developed visual abilities of members of the primate order. The pivotal juncture of domestication, architecture, and kinship comes in the tomb, which is architecturally and ideologically the focus, the center point, of many domesticated societies.
