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Uncommon Sense.

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UNCOMMON SENSE: Understanding Nature's Truths across Time and Culture. BY ANTHONY AVENI. xviii and 250 pp.; maps, diagrs., ills., bibliog., index. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006. $26.95 (cloth), ISBN 0870818287.

For more than forty years Anthony Aveni has used the theories and techniques of astronomy, cartography, mathematics, anthropology, archaeology, and history in order to understand the cultural significance of the sky to non-Western peoples. His interdisciplinary research necessitates thinking about the world in very different ways and has implications for the study of knowledge itself. Uncommon Sense is Aveni's latest exploration of the cultural context of knowledge. One of the major themes in it is that science, religion, and other ways of explaining the natural world are, in part, social enterprises conditioned by individual experience and changing cultural values through time. The remarkable volume comprises ten essays divided into two parts and is written for a well-educated general audience.

How do different approaches, milieus, geographies, and histories affect questions of, and explanations for, similar natural phenomena? In the first of four essays devoted to this question, Aveni considers different approaches to identifying the Star of...

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