This study, based on the author's thesis, studies and compares the lithic assemblages of two Upper Palaeolithic sites in Central Europe: Dolni Vestonice and Willendorf. More especially it discusses the means by which these assemblages have been classified and the issues and problems surrounding the use of typologies. Silvia Tomaskova argues that applying standardised labels to the prehistoric material fails to adequately describe it and that often these labels are used, not just to organise the material, but to interpret it as well. A history of the two sites and their investigation preceeds a discussion of the material itself and a comparison of types of behaviour from the lithic assemblages.

"Wayward Shamans" tells the story of an idea that humanityOCOs first expression of art, religion and creativity found form in the figure of a proto-priest known as a shaman. Tracing this classic category of the history of anthropology back to the emergence of the term in Siberia, the work follows the trajectory of European knowledge about the continentOCOs eastern frontier. The ethnographic record left by German natural historians engaged in the Russian colonial expansion project in the 18th century includes a range of shamanic practitioners, varied by gender and age. Later accounts by exiled Russian revolutionaries noted transgendered shamans. This variation vanished, however, in the translation of shamanism into archaeology theory, where a male sorcerer emerged as the key agent of prehistoric art. More recent efforts to provide a universal shamanic explanation for rock art via South Africa and neurobiology likewise gloss over historical evidence of diversity. By contrast this book argues for recognizing indeterminacy in the categories we use, and reopening them by recalling their complex history.