Sacred Earth, Sacred Stones is a showcase of an astonishingly beautiful selection of photographs--all in colour--of both natural landscape formations and ancient monuments and temples from every corner of the world, each in some way sacred.

In their authoritative text (Molyneaux is an archaeologist specialising in prehistoric art and society, and Vitebsky a social scientist specialising in shamanistic cultures) the authors show how mankind has, for millennia, expressed the sense of the sacred both in the setting apart of particular mountains and lakes, and in the creation of majestic buildings. Prehistoric cave paintings reveal that even prehistoric man had a sense of the Other, of something beyond the gritty reality of everyday survival.

Hindu and Buddhist temples, Jewish synagogues, Christian cathedrals, Muslim mosques: all are pictured and explored for their significance. Most evocative of all are the many ruins, from Stonehenge in England to the incredible Buddhist temple of Borobudur in Java, from Mount Parnassus in Greece to the spectacular buildings cut into solid rock in the hidden valley of Petra in Jordan.

Less well known to many Westerners are the ruined towns and temples, shrines and stepped pyramids in Central and South America: the huge Inca complex of Machu Picchu in Peru, the even more sprawling Aztec town of Teotihuacan in Mexico, and the ball-courts of the Maya in Yucatán, in which ceremonial ball games re-enacted the myths of the creation of the sun and moon.