Modelling Human-Environment Interactions in and beyond Prehistoric Europe PDF Download

Author: Samuel Seuru
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031343360
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This book offers insight into the relationship between prehistoric and protohistoric human populations and the world around them. It reconstructs key aspects of the palaeoenvironment – from large-scale drivers of environmental conditions, such as climate, to more regional variables such as vegetation cover and faunal communities. The volume underscores how computational archaeology is leading the way in the study of past human-environment interactions across spatial and chronological scales. With the increased availability of high-resolution climate models, agent-based modelling, palaeoecological proxies and the mature use of Geographic Information System in ecological modelling, archaeologists working in interdisciplinary settings are well-positioned to explore the intersection of human systems and environmental affordances and constraints. These methodological advancements provide a better understanding of the role humans played in past ecosystems – both in terms of their impact upon the environment and, in return, the impact of environmental conditions on human systems. They may also allow us to infer past ecological knowledge and land-use patterns that are historically contingent, rather than environmentally determined. This volume gathers contributions that combine reconstructions of past environments and archeological data with a view to exploring their complex interactions at different scales and invites scholars from varying disciplines and backgrounds to present and compare different modelling approaches.

Author: Daniel Contreras
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317450620
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The impacts of climate change on human societies, and the roles those societies themselves play in altering their environments, appear in headlines more and more as concern over modern global climate change intensifies. Increasingly, archaeologists and paleoenvironmental scientists are looking to evidence from the human past to shed light on the processes which link environmental and cultural change. Establishing clear contemporaneity and correlation, and then moving beyond correlation to causation, remains as much a theoretical task as a methodological one. This book addresses this challenge by exploring new approaches to human-environment dynamics and confronting the key task of constructing arguments that can link the two in concrete and detailed ways. The contributors include researchers working in a wide variety of regions and time periods, including Mesoamerica, Mongolia, East Africa, the Amazon Basin, and the Island Pacific, among others. Using methodological vignettes from their own research, the contributors explore diverse approaches to human-environment dynamics, illustrating the manifold nature of the subject and suggesting a wide variety of strategies for approaching it. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in Archaeology, Paleoenvironmental Science, Ecology, and Geology.

Author: Keith Ashley
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813043581
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
Prehistoric Florida societies, particularly those of the peninsula, have been largely ignored or given only minor consideration in overviews of the Mississippian southeast (A.D. 1000-1600). This groundbreaking volume lifts the veil of uniformity frequently draped over these regions in the literature, providing the first comprehensive examination of Mississippi-period archaeology in the state. Featuring contributions from some of the most prominent researchers in the field, this collection describes and synthesizes the latest data from excavations throughout Florida. In doing so, it reveals a diverse and vibrant collection of cleared-field maize farmers, part-time gardeners, hunter-gatherers, and coastal and riverine fisher/shellfish collectors who formed a distinctive part of the Mississipian southeast.

Author: Graeme Barker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture, Prehistoric
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description

Author: Chris Fowler
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191666890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1303

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Book Description
The Neolithic --a period in which the first sedentary agrarian communities were established across much of Europe--has been a key topic of archaeological research for over a century. However, the variety of evidence across Europe, the range of languages in which research is carried out, and the way research traditions in different countries have developed makes it very difficult for both students and specialists to gain an overview of continent-wide trends. The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe provides the first comprehensive, geographically extensive, thematic overview of the European Neolithic --from Iberia to Russia and from Norway to Malta --offering both a general introduction and a clear exploration of key issues and current debates surrounding evidence and interpretation. Chapters written by leading experts in the field examine topics such as the movement of plants, animals, ideas, and people (including recent trends in the application of genetics and isotope analyses); cultural change (from the first appearance of farming to the first metal artefacts); domestic architecture; subsistence; material culture; monuments; and burial and other treatments of the dead. In doing so, the volume also considers the history of research and sets out agendas and themes for future work in the field.

Author: Thomas Knopf
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1789690080
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This book brings together specialists of the European Bronze and Iron Age and the Japanese Yayoi and Kofun periods for the first time to discuss burial mounds in a comparative context. The book aims to strengthen knowledge of Japanese archaeology in Europe and vice versa.

Author: Eduardo S. Brondízio
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9789400799370
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Drawing on research from eleven countries across four continents, the 16 chapters in the volume bring perspectives from various specialties in anthropology and human ecology, institutional analysis, historical and political ecology, geography, archaeology, and land change sciences. The four sections of the volume reflect complementary approaches to HEI: health and adaptation approaches, land change and landscape management approaches, institutional and political-ecology approaches, and historical and archaeological approaches.

Author: Sarah A. Herr
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816536643
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries A.D., the Mogollon Rim region of east-central Arizona was a frontier, situated beyond and between larger regional organizations such as Chaco, Hohokam, and Mimbres. On this southwestern edge of the Puebloan world, past settlement poses a contradiction to those who study it. Population density was low and land abundant, yet the region was overbuilt with great kivas, a form of community-level architecture. Using a frontier model to evaluate household, community, and regional data, Sarah Herr demonstrates that the archaeological patterns of the Mogollon Rim region were created by the flexible and creative behaviors of small-scale agriculturalists. These people lived in a land-rich and labor-poor environment in which expediency, mobility, and fluid social organization were the rule and rigid structures and normative behaviors the exception. Herr's research shows that the eleventh- and twelfth-century inhabitants of the Mogollon Rim region were recent migrants, probably from the southern portion of the Chacoan region. These early settlers built houses and ceremonial structures and made ceramic vessels that resembled those of their homeland, but their social and political organization was not the same as that of their ancestors. Mogollon Rim communities were shaped by the cultural backgrounds of migrants, by their liminal position on the political landscape, and by the unique processes associated with frontiers. As migrants moved from homeland to frontier, a reversal in the proportion of land to labor dramatically changed the social relations of production. Herr argues that when the context of production changes in this way, wealth-in-people becomes more valuable than material wealth, and social relationships and cultural symbols such as the great kiva must be reinterpreted accordingly. Beyond Chaco expands our knowledge of the prehistory of this region and contributes to our understanding of how ancestral communities were constituted in lower-population areas of the agrarian Southwest.

Author: Hans Baer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317817664
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
In addressing the urgent questions raised by climate change, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of climate change guided by a critical political ecological framework. It argues that anthropologists must significantly expand their focus on climate change and their contributions to responding to climate change as a grave risk to humanity. The book presents a human socioecological framework for conceptualizing climate change. It examines the emergence and slow maturation of the anthropology of climate change; reviews the historic foundations for this work in the archaeology of climate change; and presents three alternative contemporary theoretical perspectives in the anthropology of climate change. The book synthesizes anthropological work and perspectives on climate change in the form of case studies in various regions of the world revealing the nature of global climate change as constituting multiple and somewhat diverse changes in local settings. It explores the applied anthropology of climate change in terms of the ways anthropologists are contributing to climate policy, working with communities on climate change issues, as well as within the climate movement both internationally and nationally. Finally it provides an overview of what other the social sciences are saying about climate change and explores ways that the anthropology of climate change can interface with sociology, political science, and human geography in order to create an integrated social science of climate change. This book gives researchers and students in Environmental Anthropology, Climate Change, Human Geography, and Sociology, a novel framework for understanding climate change that emphasizes human socioecological interactions.

Author: Francesco Menotti
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019161243X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Despite being one of the most successful branches of mainstream archaeology, wetland archaeology, as an academic discipline, is still relatively unknown. We might have all heard of the wonderfully preserved organic artefacts and ecofacts found in waterlogged conditions, but do we really know how they were preserved, found, retrieved, and conserved for us to admire and study? Wetland Archaeology and Beyond takes the reader through the fascinating biography of wetland archaeology, from the dawn of the discipline to its remarkable achievements. Through a discussion of a large variety of worldwide wetland archaeological sites and their material culture, Menotti offers an appreciative study of the people who occupied these sites and who created the archaeological artefacts. The volume also includes a comprehensive explanation of the procedures and research processes involved in archaeological practice and theory. Focusing on the relationship between archaeological experts and the general public, Menotti highlights the importance of this relationship for the future of the discipline as wetland ecosystems continue to disappear at an inexorable rate - and with them our invaluable cultural heritage.