Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Cafe Neandertal
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://beebebahrami.weebly.com/
CITY: Philadelphia
STATE: PA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.counterpointpress.com/authors/beebe-bahrami/ * http://stephanieelizondogriest.com/interview-with-beebe-bahrami/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/beebebahrami/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Travel writer and cultural anthropologist.
WRITINGS
Also author of the travel guide Historic Walking Guides: Madrid, DestinWorld Publishing (Darlington, England). 2009. Contributor to books, including The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 and numerous Michelin Green Guides. Contributor to magazines and periodicals, including Wine Enthusiast, Archaeology, Bark, and Pennsylvania Gazette. Author of two blogs, Cafe Oc and The Pilgrim’s Way Cafe. Author of two smartphone applications, The Esoteric Camino France and Spain and Madrid Walks.
SIDELIGHTS
Beebe Bahrami is a travel writer and cultural anthropologist specializing in writing about European, Atlantic, and Mediterranean cultures. She has written widely on topics that include food and wine, archaeology, the outdoors, spirituality, and subjects that cross cultures. “My background in anthropology trained me in the cultures, languages, peoples, prehistory and history of the Mediterranean world,” she stated on the Beebe Bahrami Website. She writes essays, travel guides, walking tour guides, travel narratives, and profiles, focusing on the people, landscape, and cultures of France and Spain.
One of Bahrami’s subspecialties is the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage road that crosses southern France and Northern Spain. Also known as the Way of Saint James and the Chemin St-Jacques, the it consists of a series of roads that lead to Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of St. James were discovered in the ninth century, according to a writer on the website Camino Adventures. Modern pilgrims make this month-long walking journey as a spiritual undertaking or to disconnect temporarily from the modern world and reconnect with themselves.
On her blog, The Pilgrim’s Way Cafe, Bahrami regularly writes about “exploring the world at the pace of the spirit, on foot,” she said on her website. In her other blog, Cafe Oc, she writes about the “rich cultural and natural terrain” of southwestern France, the Pyrenees, and northern Spain.
As a travel writer who is always on the go in diverse places around the world, Bahrami works to maintain a sense of “home” for herself wherever she goes. “I aspire to create my feeling of “home” every day, in the place I currently am, with the people I befriend, and through the meals I cook,” Bahrami told interviewer Stephanie Elizondo Griest on the Stephanie Elizondo Griest Website. “My sense of home is always weaving all my travels into it: it is taking ideas of how to live from different cultures and aspiring to integrate the most uplifting practices and the most earth sustaining ones as well. Having learned that life is constant change and adjustment to change, I have striven to make ‘home’ an interior place and to try not to cling to a physical place as home because it could change,” she further remarked to Griest.
For those who want to take up a life of travel, exploration, and adventure, Bahrami offers this advice: “Embrace your nature and start traveling, whatever your budget. The road will meet you and make it happen,” she told Griest. “When that new couch ages, that’s sort of it. But when a travel experience ages, it gets better and better.”
The Spiritual Traveler and Cafe Oc
In The Spiritual Traveler: Spain: A Guide to Sacred Sites and Pilgrim Routes, Bahrami provides readers with a thorough travel guide to the many spiritual locations in Spain. The country has a diverse religious and spiritual history, led at one time or another by Celtic, Muslim, and Catholic populations. Bahrami describes the sites, pilgrim roads, and other important remnants of these religions in Spain and gives readers comprehensive information on where to find them, how to get to them, and what to expect upon arrival. A Bookwatch reviewer called The Spiritual Traveler a “fascinating read for tourists of any faith.”
Cafe Oc : A Nomad’s Tales Of Magic, Mystery, and Finding Home in the Dordogne of Southwestern France provides a written and photographic account of Bahrami’s adventures in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, particularly in the small town of Sarlat. The title of the book originally “took its name from a delightful group of locals who meet once a month in the Cafe La Lune Poivre in Sarlat,” Bahrami commented on the Cafe Oc Blog. There, these individuals would practice speaking Occitan, or Oc, the old language that was once common in the southern areas of France. This helped the natives maintain a connection with their history and culture while also keeping part of it alive.
In the book, Bahrami explores the areas oldest prehistoric human inhabitants, the Neanderthals, and their painted caves and ancient engravings. She describes the exceptional food and wine she discovers in the region. She also pays tribute to the people of Sarlat, who welcomed her warmly and who still practiced the old ways that had sustained them through generations.
Café Neandertal
Café Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe’s Most Ancient Places documents Bahrami’s explorations in the Dordogne region of France and northwester Spain as she seeks information on the area’s oldest human inhabitants, the Neanderthal. She deploys her experience in archaeology and academic skills as a cultural anthropologist to produce a clear portrait of the prehistoric peoples who lived in the region. She describes the archeological field sites where professionals are literally digging into old camp sites and areas of habitation. With information from participating archaeologists, she discovers facts about Neanderthal life, including how they hunted, what types of rituals they performed, and how they lived in domestic settings. She relates her experiences at flint-knapping, one of the most ancient of Neanderthal skills used to produce tools and weapons. Bahrami also describes how she participated in some of the archaeological digs, and the “electrifying sensation of handling dirt, stones, and bones, and their fleeting connections to the humans who occupied these areas” 70,000 years in the past, commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor observed that Café Neandertal is “Written with all the flair and enthusiasm of an experienced writer eager to share her love of her subject.” Booklist writer Colleen Mondor remarked that Bahrami is a “delightful guide in this thoroughly enjoyable look” into the region’s Neanderthal research.
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Bahrami, Beebe, Cafe Oc : A Nomad’s Tales Of Magic, Mystery, and Finding Home in the Dordogne of Southwestern France (memoir), Shanti Arts Publishing (Brunswick, ME), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2017, Colleen Mondor, review of Café Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe’s Most Ancient Places.
Bookwatch, October, 2009. review of The Spiritual Traveler: Spain.
Cosmos, autumn, 2017, “Culture and Our Complex Cousins,” review of Café Neandertal.
Internet Bookwatch, October., 2009, review of The Spiritual Traveler: Spain.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of Café Neandertal.
Publishers Weekly, January 23, 2017, review of Café Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe’s Most Ancient Places, p. 72.
ONLINE
Beebe Bahrami Website, http://www.beebebahrami.weebly.com (October 30, 2017).
Booklist Online, https://www.booklistonline.com (February 15, 2017 ), review of Café Neandertal.
Cafe Oc Blog, http://cafeoc.blogspot.com (October 30, 2017).
Camino Adventures Website, http://www.caminoadventures.com/ (October 31, 2017).
Stephanie Elizondo Griest Website, http://www.stephanieelizondogriest.com/ (October 30, 2017), interview with Beebe Bahrami.
Beebe Bahrami is a widely-published writer and cultural anthropologist specializing in narrative, memoir, and creative nonfiction. She especially focuses on travel, adventure, food and wine, cross-cultural, archaeological, and spiritual themes, especially from her travels and life in Europe, North America, North Africa, and Southwest Asia. She writes most about France and Spain, two places she fell in love with together three decades ago.
A veteran on both sides of the Pyrenees of the Way of Saint James (also called the Camino de Santiago and Chemin St-Jacques) she also writes extensively about the stories and deep history and prehistory connected to this ancient sacred road.
Beebe has written two travel narratives on France:
Cafe Oc--A Nomad's Tales of Magic, Mystery, and Finding Home in the Dordogne of Southwestern France (November 2016, Shanti Arts Publishing) is a travel memoir both on the life and culture of southwestern France's Dordogne region and also a story about a nomad finding home and leaving her tent poles anchored in place.
Cafe Neandertal--Excavating Our Past in One of Europe's Most Ancient Places (March 2017, Counterpoint Press), set mostly in southwestern France, is a travel narrative, popular science book, and archaeological adventure into the world of the Neandertals--who they were, where they lived, and what happened to them--as well as the archaeologists and knowledgeable locals who know them best.
Beebe has also written two travel books on Spain:
The Spiritual Traveler: Spain--A Guide to Sacred Sites and Pilgrim Routes and Historic Walking Guides Madrid is a celebration of the truly sacred and spiritual places, traditions, peoples, and roads of Spain from prehistory to the present. Each chapter explores a theme and a region.
Historic Walking Guides Madrid takes the visitor down eight deep and unique self-guided walking routes in Madrid toward getting to know the city's secrets, history, and best food and wine like a local.
In addition to books, Beebe's writing appears in numerous guides, magazines, and collections including The Best Women's Travel Writing 2010, Michelin Green Guides (numerous destinations in France and the USA), National Geographic books, Wine Enthusiast, The Pennsylvania Gazette, Archaeology, and The Bark.
You can read her work at www.beebebahrami.weebly.com, and her two blogs, Cafe Oc (cafeoc.blogspot.com) and The Piglrim's Way Cafe (pilgrimswaycafe.blogspot.com).
About Beebe
I am an award winning freelance travel writer and anthropologist passionate for European, Atlantic, and Mediterranean cultures.
Widely published in travel, food and wine, outdoors and adventure, archaeology, spiritual, and cross-cultural topics, I have lived and traveled in the diverse cultures of Europe, North Africa, Southwest Asia, and across North America.
My background in anthropology trained me in the cultures, languages, peoples, prehistory and history of the Mediterranean world. I write most on France and Spain and am often there unearthing new discoveries about these rich and multilayered western Mediterranean places.
My primary writing forms and genres are travel narratives, guides, memoirs, profiles, and essays for books, magazines, and websites. My literary agent is Laura Strachan of Strachan Literary Agency who represents me for all book length works except for travel guides.
I have two travel books on Spain, The Spiritual Traveler Spain—A Guide to Sacred Sites and Pilgrim Routes (Paulist Press) and Historic Walking Guides: Madrid (DestinWorld Publishing). I also have two travel narratives on France, Cafe Oc—A Nomad's Tales of Magic, Mystery and Finding Home in the Dordogne of Southwestern France (Shanti Arts Publishing), and Cafe Neandertal—Excavating Our Past In One of Europe's Most Ancient Places (Counterpoint Press) To learn more, please visit my book page.
I also write extensively on the pilgrimage road, the Camino de Santiago, across southern France and northern Spain, for numerous travel guides and magazines, including as the travel expert for Bindu, where I write deep itineraries for exploring the Camino and also for other engaging experiences across southern France and northern Spain. I also write two blogs, a pilgrim's blog, The Pilgrim's Way Cafe, dedicated to exploring the world at the pace of the spirit, on foot, and Cafe Oc, exploring the rich cultural and natural terrain of Southwestern France (and into the Pyrenees and northern Spain).
My work also appears in Wine Enthusiast, Archaeology, The Pennsylvania Gazette, The Best Women's Travel Writing, Transitions Abroad, Perceptive Travel, Expedition, The Bark, Michelin Green Guides, and National Geographic books among others. To read more, please check out my articles and essays.
Interview with Beebe Bahrami
This week’s Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 contributor is a writer and anthropologist who has intimately explored the cultures, languages, peoples, and histories of the western Mediterranean world:Beebe Bahrami. The author of The Spiritual Traveler: Spain — A Guide to Sacred Sites and Pilgrim Routes, she has also written for the Michelin Green Guides, National Geographic books, and Archaeology magazine. Visit her website at www.beebesfeast.com.
What is “home” for you? Is it a particular place or person or thing?
I aspire to create my feeling of “home” every day, in the place I currently am, with the people I befriend, and through the meals I cook. (I also like to have a bouquet of fresh flowers on my table, ever since I saw Laura do that with daffodils in Doctor Zhivago.)
My sense of home is always weaving all my travels into it: it is taking ideas of how to live from different cultures and aspiring to integrate the most uplifting practices and the most earth sustaining ones as well. Having learned that life is constant change and adjustment to change, I have striven to make “home” an interior place and to try not to cling to a physical place as home because it could change. I could instead spend my energy savoring what it is and where I am now. If I can make the present feel like home, then I’ve succeeded in celebrating the best that life has to offer. This, of course, is the ideal I work with.
When did you first hit the road? How did it go?
As a kid, my family always traveled. We would take spontaneous road trips, stop at places that interested us, and look for a place to stay once we arrived wherever it was that we felt was a fun place to stay overnight. We also traveled internationally but that was always for the purpose of visiting relatives in Iran.
As a solo traveler, I really struck out on my own when I went to study for a college semester at the University of Seville in Spain. I would spend hours exploring Seville on foot and I would take off on breaks and walk, hike, and take local buses and trains around southern Spain, Portugal, and France. I fell in love with the whole idea of just going and finding out what the road had to offer. Unmarked bus stops, no hotel reservations, little money for a hotel anyhow, and train strikes made for obstacle courses I’d never trade in. They led to making friends, asking strangers for help, sharing food with strangers, and walking into unknown territory, stretching my skills and trust in the world.
Indeed, I worry that people over plan their trips these days because of all the information available on the Internet. I like to recapture as much as possible the original idea of a pilgrimage: to leave what is familiar and to trust that you will be able to handle the unknown that comes at you and very likely have a terrific time. This way, you learn what you are made of and meet fascinating characters along the way.
How did you break into the travel writing scene?
I’ve always written, nearly everyday working at the craft in one form or another, and I have always striven to make sense of a life dedicated to learning about other cultures. Both of these are good starts for travel writing, but my first real break into the scene came through a project to write two chapters in a coffee table book for National Geographic books, Peoples of the World. They were looking for experts on the areas for which they needed chapters and who could write clear prose for a broad audience. I wrote the chapters on North Africa and the Middle East. I worked with a terrific editor and learned a lot about solid travel writing. That made me more adventurous to further explore my voice as a writer. I realized that travel writing was well suited to my nature and to my training as an anthropologist. I began looking at my fieldwork in the western Mediterranean as a great source of writing material, taking the on-the-ground experiences and insights and turning them into prose that would reach out to people and tap into their own universal experience of being human, while giving them an appreciation for the uniqueness of the culture and people about which I wrote.
What travel story will you still be telling your pals in the nursing home?
For the pals who are willing to listen for a while, I’d want to tell them about the liberation and exhilaration of walking the Camino, the pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela. This is an adventure to which I keep adding as I have walked the French Road and portions of other roads and keep going back to walk new stretches of new roads in France, Spain, and Portugal.
But for the less epic length tales, I always like the humorous stories where something unexpected and humbling happens and everyone laughs about it. A top one for me was when eight men in northern Spain competed with each other in offering marriage proposals to me. In didn’t matter to them that I was already married; the performance was really for each other, not me. They were funny, jovial, saucy, and absolutely harmless, even if they were royal flirts. That piece came out in The Pennsylvania Gazette, “The Mother Hens of Andrín.”
Another fun story was when I was researching my book, The Spiritual Traveler: Spain—A Guide to Sacred Sites and Pilgrim Routes, and two friends joined me for my research in Basque Country. I had originally intended to track down a very local Marian phenomenon in a place called Unbe but could not find it. A friend of mine in Bilbao had told me about it: A farmwoman in the Basque mountains had had several visitations from Mary over the years, and the farmhouse and stream nearby all had healing energy and were gaining reverence among locals who knew about it.
Basque culture is rich with ancient and surviving matriarchal qualities and so that this shrine was in traditional Basque territory made it all the more intriguing. Was it another case of Mary as the ancient Mother Goddess occurrence? As a perennial student of matriarchal cultures in Europe, I hoped so.
But having had no luck in locating Unbe, I suggested to my friends that we stick to the coastline and make our way to the more masculine shrine of San Juan de Gaztelugatxe (a fascinating hermitage on a rock island connected to the mainland via a great stone bridge). We were certain we knew exactly where we were going as long as we kept the coast to our left. Forty minutes later, we had no idea how it happened, but we found ourselves deep in the mountains and utterly lost. I suggested that at the next sign of human habitation, I’d look for a local and ask him or her where we were. Ten minutes later, we came around a bend and there was an inn and two cars parked in the narrow space off of the one-lane, two-way road on which we traveled. We pulled over and I jumped out and in to the front room of the inn where a hardy farmwoman was serving up lunch to her two patrons. When I asked her where we were, she smiled enigmatically as if we were expected, “Why, sweetheart, you’re in Unbe.”
The farmhouse shrine was just a few more meters down the road. Stunned at first, we then laughed and joked that if the Goddess deems it, she will find you no matter what. We then sat down to a great meal of beans, bacalao, and greens, and afterwards made our way to the shrine. Though it is unknown to most people outside of the radius of Bilbao, it is a powerful sacred spot and probably has been for millennia. (I did, in the end, include Unbe in my book.)
Let’s say you could take a free trip with anyone of your choosing (a historical figure, an ancestor, a super hero, etc). Who would it be, where would you go, and why?
My passion for travel writing came through my studies of travel narratives in cultural anthropology. I was intrigued by heavy-hitters like Herodotus (c.484-425 BCE) and Ibn Battuta (1304-c.1369) and more recent 19th century writers like Sir Richard Francis Burton, the great multilingual scholar and explorer (1821-1890), or intrepid female writer-explorers Isabella Bird (1831-1904) and Gertrude Bell (1868-1926).
To pick one, I would have to go with Ibn Battuta. He had a real sense of adventure that trusted the unknown, traveling for some 30 years. During a time when the world was not so wide to most people, he took off and traversed the Old World. Just to glimpse that past world through which he traveled and then to look at how he wrote about it, I think would both be fascinating and also make for terrific sparring sessions around the campfire at night. “I can’t believe this is how you write about these folks. I found them to be very agreeable.”
Name one place that should top everyone’s travel dream list be it a nation or a landmark or a village.
I would encourage everyone with the desire to travel to find their own magical spot based on their passions and nature. You can find your slice of paradise anywhere, even more so if you are not trying to follow someone else’s prescription for where to find it or experience it. That said, I heartily recommend finding a pilgrimage road that appeals to you and to striking out onto it. There are thousands to pick from. They can be famous, like the Camino, but they can be intimate and known only to a certain town or village, as I discovered all across Spain and Portugal, where nearly every locale has some form of pilgrimage road that leads to a nearby holy shrine during certain times of the year. It can be a stretch of the Appalachian Trail, or a hike to a holy mount in the Holy Land, or to a Buddhist temple. Wherever it is, walked with centeredness and trust in one’s abilities and in life, it can become a travel dream top list experience.
What specific travel resources (websites, guidebooks, blogs, etc) do you always consult when planning a journey?
Part of what revs me to travel is not knowing too much about the how, what, and when. The why and where, well, that is what starts my journeys.
So, resources I consult are the ones that teach me as much as I can get my hands on about the culture, the natural environment, and the language. I delve into language guides, travel narratives—from old ones to recent ones—and good cultural accounts (like many in the Culture Shock series). As for flights, trains, lodging, restaurants, what to do once there, of which the Internet is rich, I plan less there because so much of the spontaneity of travel arises out of not knowing everything and letting things happen.
After I read up on travel narratives, cultural accounts, language study, as well as any quirks about how daily life gets done in a place, I then settle on one guidebook to take and wing the rest.
On selecting guidebooks, I always spend a lot of time perusing them in bookstores, feeling each one out on my destination place. As I look them over, I imagine myself on the ground, in the train station, at the door to a hostel, etc., using it. Its content and organization have to pass these tests. While all guidebooks have strengths and weaknesses, I do have a larger portion of Lonely Planet and Cadogen guides than any other. Both do content and organization really well and both tend to hire writers who really know the culture.
Once on the ground, the anthropologist gene kicks in and I strive to build on the book foundation of cultural knowledge by getting out there and hobnobbing with the locals.
What is the hardest lesson you¹ve learned on the road?
The hardest lesson is also the best and most joyous lesson: that I can rely on myself and that I have a lot more muscle inside me than I realized. It was far easier—but equally delightful—to learn that most people you meet are motivated by humanity and kindness. They want to help and they want to connect.
What advice can you offer to women with itchy feet?
Embrace your nature and start traveling, whatever your budget. The road will meet you and make it happen. Lots of people actually have more of a budget for travel than they realize, if they are willing to examine the expectations of life that direct their daily choices. I have forgone buying lots of things and lots of take-out coffee with the promise of travel as a reward. When that new couch ages, that’s sort of it. But when a travel experience ages, it gets better and better. So, I have no couch. It’s hardly a sacrifice.
BEEBE BAHRAMI is a professional writer known for award-winning travel, memoir, archaeology, outdoors and adventure, food and wine, spiritual, and cross-cultural writing. Author of The Spiritual Traveler Spain (Paulist Press, 2009) and Historic Walking Guides Madrid (DestinWorld Publishing, 2009), her work also appears in Archaeology, Wine Enthusiast, Bark, The Pennsylvania Gazette, National Geographic books, Michelin Green Guides, Expedition, and Perceptive Travel, among others. She wrote two travel apps, The Esoteric Camino France & Spain and Madrid Walks, and maintains two blogs, Café Oc, on life in the Dordogne, and The Pilgrim’s Way Café, dedicated to exploring the world on foot. You can read more about her and her writing at beebebahrami.weebly.com.
She is the author of:
Cafe Neandertal: Tracking One of Prehistory’s Biggest Mysteries in One of France’s Most Ancient Places
Café Oc is both the name of this blog and of my just-released travel memoir, Café Oc--A Nomad's Tales of Magic, Mystery, and Finding Home in the Dordogne of Southwestern France (Shanti Arts Publishing).
A few years ago on a very cold winter day in January, chased across northern Spain into southern France by a hurricane turned tornado, I blew into the town of Sarlat and fell in love. It felt like coming home. Since then, I have dedicated myself to going back as often as I can. I celebrate the day-to-day with friends and learn as much about this ancient region as possible, from Neanderthal occupations to the present.
Cafe Oc originally took its name from a delightful group of locals who meet once a month in the Cafe La Lune Poivre in Sarlat to practice speaking Occitan, the old Romance language of the south of France. Their language and culture, Occitan or Oc for short (which is also the word for yes in Occitan) is deeply connected to the land and teaches one a lot about the vibrant life of this never-industrialized part of France.
I am a fulltime freelance writer and anthropologist with particular passion for European and Mediterranean cultures. I am widely published in travel, food and wine, outdoors and adventure, spiritual, and cross-cultural topics. Literary agent Laura Strachan of Strachan Literary represents me for book length works. To read more, please visit www.beebebahrami.weebly.com and The Pilgrim's Way Cafe, pilgrimswaycafe.blogspot.com
The Spiritual Traveler: Spain
(Oct. 2009):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
The Spiritual Traveler: Spain
Beebe Bahrami
Hidden Spring
c/o Paulist Press
997 MacArthur Boulevard, Mahwah, NJ 07430
www.hiddenspringbooks.com 1-800-218-1903
9781587680472 $24.00 www.paulistpress.com
A gateway of sorts between Africa and Europe, Spain has an incredible amount of history. "The Spiritual Traveler: Spain: A Guide to Sacred Sites and Pilgrim Routes" is a guide to the many spiritual locations of Spain, which has been ruled by Catholic Europeans, Muslim Moors, Wiccan Celts, and other peoples whose faiths have left an undeniable mark. A fascinating read for tourists of any faith, "The Spiritual Traveler" is especially recommended for any spiritual person visiting Spain.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Spiritual Traveler: Spain." The Bookwatch, Oct. 2009. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA209903730&it=r&asid=b33e46ab7b3edf6152f4311e4568616e. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A209903730
Cafe Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe's Most Ancient Places
264.4 (Jan. 23, 2017): p72.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Cafe Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe's Most Ancient Places
Beebe Bahrami. Counterpoint, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-61902-777-0
Bahrami (Cafe Oc), an anthropologist and travel writer, explores the Dordogne region of France, as well as northwestern Spain, seeking clues to the lives of the prehistoric humans who inhabited the region. She imparts the electrifying sensation of handling dirt, stones, and bones, and their fleeting connections to the humans who occupied these areas some 70,000 years ago. With a pilgrim's reverence and a scientist's exactitude, Bahrami captures the textures, smells, and sounds of the excavation sites and adjacent towns. Melding science reporting and travelogue, she chats with internationally renowned anthropologists about the rituals of the hearth, hunt, and burial; mingles with the locals over aperitifs; attempts to perfect her flint-knapping skills; partners with researchers to dig and scrape; and dutifully explains the importance of every find, down to the smallest ancient tooth and coprolite. She writes a great deal about local wine, herbed snails, and wild mushroom cream sauces consumed over hearty debates about the Neandertal diet and way of life--and the evidence in the soil showing them to be in ways more adaptable, innovative, and less rigid-thinking than modern Homo sapiens. At the heart of this story is Bahrami's trek through densely overgrown pre-historic territory in search of a visceral connection to and deeper understanding of all humankind. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Cafe Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe's Most Ancient Places." Publishers Weekly, 23 Jan. 2017, p. 72. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479714221&it=r&asid=b94af14b3a5dc6dc9d846d838a3b8551. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479714221
Bahrami, Beebe: CAFE NEANDERTAL
(Feb. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Bahrami, Beebe CAFE NEANDERTAL Counterpoint (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 3, 14 ISBN: 978-1-61902-777-0
Memoir of a food-and-travel journalist who displays her love of archaeology.Bahrami (Historic Walking Guides: Madrid, 2009, etc.) covers events from 2010 to 2015, most of them at the dig at La Ferrassie in France, where seven nearly complete Neanderthal skeletons were found. The author describes her position as "the upstairs-downstairs journalist-crew-anthropologist folded into [a] camp of some thirty quirky, very opinionated, very international, and very bright archaeologists and students as they worked into one of the great mysteries of the human journey on earth." Interviews and informal conversations with these men and women abound as Bahrami picks their brains about their work. Debates center on how much Neanderthals were like modern humans. Did they have language and symbolic thought? Did they participate in rituals, such as burial of the dead? Though Bahrami does not provide all the answers, she effectively portrays the rich atmosphere at a dig. Over good food and drink after a day's work, she talked to the scientists, seeking different perspectives, and she quotes their opinions at length. In addition, she came to know and appreciate the local amateur prehistory experts who are invariably proud of the fact that Neanderthals once thrived in their area. Bahrami's technique results in lots of repetition and some entertaining but extraneous information; however, this is not intended to be a textbook but rather a memoir and an amiable introduction to a bit of prehistory. In one chapter, the author concentrates on what the science of genetics has brought to the study of the migrations out of Africa, to the evolution of modern man, and to our closest kin, the Neanderthals, with whom we share 99.7 percent of our DNA. Written with all the flair and enthusiasm of an experienced writer eager to share her love of her subject.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bahrami, Beebe: CAFE NEANDERTAL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234424&it=r&asid=50b9a044898de0486d919854941c37ca. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234424
The Spiritual Traveler: Spain
(Oct. 2009):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
The Spiritual Traveler: Spain
Beebe Bahrami
Hidden Spring
c/o Paulist Press
997 MacArthur Boulevard, Mahwah, NJ 07430
www.hiddenspringbooks.com 1-800-218-1903
9781587680472 $24.00 www.paulistpress.com
A gateway of sorts between Africa and Europe, Spain has an incredible amount of history. "The Spiritual Traveler: Spain: A Guide to Sacred Sites and Pilgrim Routes" is a guide to the many spiritual locations of Spain, which has been ruled by Catholic Europeans, Muslim Moors, Wiccan Celts, and other peoples whose faiths have left an undeniable mark. A fascinating read for tourists of any faith, "The Spiritual Traveler" is especially recommended for any spiritual person visiting Spain.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Spiritual Traveler: Spain." Internet Bookwatch, Oct. 2009. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA209902910&it=r&asid=ca90c228a0900d5e7161d16dfc83c9cb. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A209902910
Café Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe’s Most Ancient Places.
Bahrami, Beebe (author).
Mar. 2017. 288p. Counterpoint, hardcover, $26 (9781619027770). 569.986.
REVIEW. First published February 15, 2017 (Booklist).
Award-winning writer Bahrami is a delightful guide in this thoroughly enjoyable look into the research and recovery of a group of Neanderthal remains in the French Dordogne region. With a background in archaeology, she is certainly qualified, but her wide interests in travel, memoir, food, wine, and more make this exceedingly engaging title more like a French version of Under the Tuscan Sun (1996) with an origins-of-humanity spin than the expected scholarly tome. Bahrami immerses readers in the countryside where the Neanderthals were found, introduces individuals actively involved in studying them, and takes readers along on the thoroughly modern adventure of understanding who the Neanderthals were, why they disappeared, and how humans are related to them. She also shares her own journey of signing up to write about the Dordogne discoveries and how she found herself quickly becoming consumed by her subject. The story became bigger and bigger, encompassing not only the Neanderthals and those in the field recovering them but also the people of this unusual region. Ultimately, Bahrami determined that the biggest truth of the discovery was that we are “all in this together, and it’s messy. Welcome to the family.” Highly recommended for archaeology and prehistory buffs and armchair travelers.— Colleen Mondor
counterpoint press
Café Neandertal: Tracking One of Prehistory's Biggest Mysteries in One of France's Most Ancient Places
Beebe Bahrami
Counterpoint Press (2017)
The relationship with our distant Neanderthal cousins is complex – part origin story, part romance, and both larded with an unhealthy dollop of Rousseau’s Noble Savage. We admire them and relate to their plight, but there is also disdain. “Neanderthal” remains a term of abuse, synonymous with slow wits and a lack of sophistication, no matter how much evidence we might find of the real Neanderthals’ advanced tool use and the survival skills we have lost, if we ever we held them.
Then there is a small matter of their extinction. They must have been inferior to modern humans if we survived and they didn’t, right? But, as one scientist in Café Neandertal points out, Neanderthals lived for more than 250,000 years, whereas we Homo sapiens have only managed 160,000 so far.
But that hasn’t stopped our growing fascination, driven in large measure by geneticist Svante Pääbo, whose lifelong obsession with ancient DNA has helped to write pages of paleo history that seemed lost forever. And with the discovery that there is a little bit of them in all of us has come insights into our own human origins.
It doesn’t matter that most of what we think we know of what it means to be Neanderthal is almost certainly wrong, and, some believe, might not be possible to ever get right. “We think with the Homo sapiens mind,” Bahrami quotes one archaeologist as saying. “We can’t possibly know the Neandertal reality.” And yet it is precisely the search for that reality which lies at the heart of this beautifully crafted book.
While Bahrami gives an excellent account of the pioneering DNA sequencing of Pääbo and others, it is the story of the extraordinary work of palaeoanthropologists, struggling to bring the Neanderthals to life; to recreate how they lived, loved and died, that clearly captures her imagination.
Mind you, it was with an inward groan that one reads from the blurb, “Café Neandertal is also a detective story, investigating one of the biggest mysteries of prehistory and archaeology”. The detective story trope is too often the cliché juste publicists grope for to describe any straightforward piece of scientific enquiry. But as it turns out, it is entirely justified with Café Neandertal, which indeed picks up the many pieces of the puzzle, carefully examines them and painstakingly places them in context.
In many ways is a most unusual science book. Bahrami is a wonderful writer who brings many of the attributes of the novel to a clear and compelling narrative that encapsulates a snapshot of the state of our current knowledge about Neanderthals.
Peopled with a vast cast of fascinating characters, from village locals to querulous scientists, it brings to life the excitement of unearthing the past and describes the “new, more enlightened era in studies of human evolution” that is dawning.
Bahrami is an anthropologist by training and throughout this book those roots show. Brought up in the American school of cultural anthropology, as a student she was encouraged to undergo psychotherapy before going out into the field. The thinking was that unless one’s own biases were uncovered and known, any reading of another cultural system was bound to become tainted by mirroring the psyche of the researcher – a problem she notes that is rampant in the field of palaeoanthropology.
Given the incomplete picture of the deep past that we have at any given time, archaeology, she notes, is as much art as science. And this almost inevitably leads to emotion creeping in. “Thinking that Neandertals buried their dead,” archaeologist Dennis Sandgathe says, “makes them more human, more like us, so we like this idea.” But there is little evidence for it and any dogmatic belief that they did is a case of desire overriding science.
'Archaeology is a multi-generational process, in which one generation of archaeologists will close a dig with the expectation that the next may have better techniques and tools at their disposal'
The book begins and ends in the southwest of France in the beautiful and ancient Périgord region, which itself plays a starring role. Bahrami draws the book’s title from the near-universal fascination for prehistory among those who live within reach of the Dordogne River, an area with the richest concentration of early hominid sites in the world. Locals, she found, whether born there or, like her, migrants to the region, feel a deep spiritual connection to its prehistory, “a profound connection to life, land, and spirit for all who came later”. “That’s when I realised we all existed in a special place, one I called Café Neandertal.”
Bahrami’s book follows the main dig featured – at the La Ferrassie site from 2010 to 2014 – and the subsequent lab work through the summer of 2015. It is not the first time La Ferrassie – the motherlode of Neanderthal sites in southwestern France and Europe – has been excavated, and nor will it be the last.
As she explains, archaeology is a multi-generational process, in which one generation of archaeologists will close a dig with the expectation that the next may have better techniques and tools at their disposal to winkle out a more accurate picture of the long past.
And La Ferrassie holds many secrets. Of 30 or so nearly complete skeletons of Neanderthals across the world, it has yielded seven.
The latest mission was designed to reinvestigate the question of whether Neanderthals buried their dead – and whether they had at La Ferrassie, as earlier generations had conjectured. This was to be done by using improved state-of-the-art excavation techniques. There were also questions of tool creation and use, innovation and creativity, love and family to be addressed, along with, perhaps the most vexed problem of all, why did the Neanderthals disappear around 35,000 years ago?
While there are not definitive answers to any of these questions, and probably never will be, Bahrami helps us to understand the value of trying – and the complexities of doing so.
Neanderthals, after all, were an extraordinarily diverse bunch – just as diverse as modern humans today across the globe and perhaps more so. And then there is the time scale over which they lived – look, for example, how much Homo sapiens have changed just in the past 100,000 years.
Of why this strong, resourceful, intelligent species died out, Bahrami says, “there are lots of theories and as usual, probably not one is an answer”. And, despite this brilliant account of the current thinking, that’s probably a fair summation of the whole endeavour of trying to piece together the minutiae of prehistoric life.
As one of the leading scientists explains to the author: “We need to remain humble, and know we will never know everything. We’ll never unlock the entire mystery of human evolution.”
But that, he adds, is what makes it so exciting.
This article appeared in Cosmos 74 - Autumn 2017 under the headline "Culture and our complex cousins"