Customer Reviews

Practicing Primitive: A Handbook of Aboriginal Skills

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Thorough, well written and heavily researched. Watts does a great job relaying primitive skills to the reader. Not just how to do them, but how recreations of various tasks were done, including the time and effort involved. Well worth every penny!!

I'm giving this book as a gift so I haven't thoroughly read every page (though I did skim it heavily), but having had the privilege of learning under Steve, I've read much of the information in this book before when it was presented as student handouts.

As Steve says, "If it's not in context, it's just arts and crafts." Whether in a class or in this book, he sets out to not just teach us how to recreate objects, but to hopefully understand the people, places and reasons behind how and why they were made. While this book would not be a hand-holding, color photo, step-by-step manual for the complete novice, it is a compilation of well-organized information and inspiration for the person who's already used to working with his/her hands. For those who dabble in this field to those who are serious students, the greatest asset of this book is it's clear organization of information that's readily accessible.

The black and white photos aren't the highest quality but Steve's many illustrations clarify the details and are the highlight of the book. (Like a Holling C. Holling book -- There's the story and then there's the meat in the annotated illustrations. Minn of the Mississippi)

I've always been in awe of the way Steve is able to take the depth of information in his head and hands and weave it together to make it so accessible to his students. Through his own illustrations and a poet's sense of essential sparseness, Steve conveys incredible amounts of information, and being a perpetual student, himself, his works are always laced with humor and wonder.

This collection of articles is, as always well done. Steve has reached a level at the very core of "practicing primitives" that many of us wish we could achieve. If you haven't been a long time subscriber to the Society of Primitive Technology newsletters or bought the compilations from those, this will be fresh, new material for you, and well worth the price.

Steve Watts, an A-list ancient skills expert, has produced an opus of life-work. Serving as an experiential archaeology curator at the Schiele Museum in Gastonia, North Carolina gave him the opportunity to study so-called primitive technologies every day. His forays into paleolithics have helped define an entire new genre, and have redefined how we moderns must view our ancestors, and therefore our selves. Steve's teachings are timeless and, as always, filled with gracious, often humorous, pragmatism. Practicing Primitive is well worth it.Wildfire-fire Making Art