Includes bibliographical references and index.

What do walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines. In this 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 takes him from the music of Ancient Greece to that of contemporary Japan, from Siberian labyrinths to Native American weaving, from Australian Aboriginal songlines to Roman roads, and from Chinese calligraphy to the printed alphabet, weaving a path between antiquity and the present.