Download or read book The Archaeology of Environmental Change written by Christopher T. Fisher and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2012-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, a diverse collection of case studies reveal how archaeology can contribute to a better understanding of humans' relation to the environment. The Archaeology of Environmental Change shows that the environmental challenges facing humanity today can be better approached through an attempt to understand how past societies dealt with similar circumstances.
Download or read book Geoarchaeology Climate Change and Sustainability written by Antony Gavin Brown and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Geoarchaeology Climate Change and Sustainability written by Antony G. Brown and published by Geological Society of America. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a broad survey of recent advances in geoarchaeology with particular attention to environmental change. The fourteen chapters include methodologically innovative research, case studies valuable for teaching, and the use of geological techniques to answer archaeological questions from lower Paleolithic hunting to the location of Homer's Ithaca. Geoarchaeology, Climate Change, and Sustainability also includes a major position paper and, unusually, two papers on the management of the geoarchaeological resource. Both the geographical and chronological coverage are broad ranging from the Lower Paleolithic (lower Pleistocene) to the Iron Age (late Holocene), and from rural Iran to urban Manhattan. The research presented here clearly demonstrates the value and practical application of geoarchaeological techniques from sediment-based dating to geographic information systems.
Download or read book Environmental Archaeology written by Chris Turney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental Archaeology: Theoretical and Practical Approaches outlines and assesses the various methods used to reconstruct and explain the past interaction between people and their environment. Emphasising the importance of a highly scientific approach to the subject, the book combines geoarchaeological, bioarchaeological (archaeobotany and zooarchaeology) and geochronological information and examines how these various aspects of archaeology may be used to enhance our knowledge and understanding of past human environments. Drawing from both the practical experiences of the authors and cutting-edge research, Environmental Archaeology: Theoretical and Practical Approaches is a valuable contribution to the subject. It will be essential reading for students and professionals in archaeology, geography and anthropology.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Environmental Change written by Christopher T. Fisher and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water management, soil conservation, sustainable animal husbandry . . . because such socio-environmental challenges have been faced throughout history, lessons from the past can often inform modern policy. In this book, case studies from a wide range of times and places reveal how archaeology can contribute to a better understanding of humans' relation to the environment. The Archaeology of Environmental Change shows that the challenges facing humanity today, in terms of causing and reacting to environmental change, can be better approached through an attempt to understand how societies in the past dealt with similar circumstances. The contributors draw on archaeological research in multiple regions—North America, Mesoamerica, Europe, the Near East, and Africa—from time periods spanning the Holocene, and from environments ranging from tropical forest to desert. Through such examples as environmental degradation in Transjordan, wildlife management in East Africa, and soil conservation among the ancient Maya, they demonstrate the negative effects humans have had on their environments and how societies in the past dealt with these same problems. All call into question and ultimately refute popular notions of a simple cause-and-effect relationship between people and their environment, and reject the notion of people as either hapless victims of unstoppable forces or inevitable destroyers of natural harmony. These contributions show that by examining long-term trajectories of socio-natural relationships we can better define concepts such as sustainability, land degradation, and conservation—and that gaining a more accurate and complete understanding of these connections is essential for evaluating current theories and models of environmental degradation and conservation. Their insights demonstrate that to understand the present environment and to manage landscapes for the future, we must consider the historical record of the total sweep of anthropogenic environmental change.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Human Environment Interactions written by Daniel Contreras and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Historical Archaeology and Environment written by Marcos André Torres de Souza and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume gathers contributions focused on understanding the environment through the lens of Historical Archaeology. Pressing issues such as climate change, global warming, the Anthropocene and loss of biodiversity have pushed scholars from different areas to examine issues related to the causes, processes, and consequences of these phenomena. While traditional barriers between natural and social sciences have been torn down, these issues have gradually occupied a central place in the field of anthropology. As archaeology involves the transdisciplinary study of cultural and natural evidence related to the past, it is in a privileged position to discuss the historical depth of some of the processes related to environment that are deeply affecting the world today. This volume brings together substantial and comprehensive contributions to the understanding of the environment in a historical perspective along three lines of inquiry: Theoretical and methodological approaches to the environment in Historical Archaeology Studies on environmental Historical Archaeology Historical Archaeology and the Anthropocene Historical Archaeology and Environment will be of interest to researchers in both social and environmental sciences, working in different disciplines and research areas, such as archaeology, history, geography, anthropology, climate change studies, environmental analysis and sustainable development studies.
Download or read book Climate Change Archaeology written by Robert Van de Noort and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is beyond doubt that the climate is changing, presenting us with one of the biggest challenges in the twenty-first-century. During the past 150 years, archaeologists have studied the impact of climate change on humanity; however, this information has not yet been used when considering the impact climate change will have on future human communities. This pioneering study addresses this major paradox in modern climate change research, and provides the theoretical basis for archaeological data to be included in climate change debates - an approach which uses archaeological research as a repository of ideas and concepts which can help build the resilience of modern communities against the background of rapid climate change. Applying this approach to four case study areas, which will be among the first to be significantly affected by climate change - the coastal wetlands of the North Sea, the Sundarbans, Florida's Gulf Coast, and the Iraqi Marshland, this comparative study illustrates the diversity of adaptive pathways implemented in times of climate change in the past and how these can help prepare modern communities.
Download or read book Bioarchaeology and Climate Change written by Gwen Robbins Schug and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Using subadult skeletons from the Deccan Chalcolithic period of Indian prehistory, along with archaeological and paleoclimate data, this volume makes an important contribution to understanding the effects of ecological change on demography and childhood growth during the second millennium B.C. in peninsular India."--Michael Pietrusewsky, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa In the context of current debates about global warming, archaeology contributes important insights for understanding environmental changes in prehistory, and the consequences and responses of past populations to them. In Indian archaeology, climate change and monsoon variability are often invoked to explain major demographic transitions, cultural changes, and migrations of prehistoric populations. During the late Holocene (1400-700 B.C.), agricultural communities flourished in a semiarid region of the Indian subcontinent, until they precipitously collapsed. Gwen Robbins Schug integrates the most recent paleoclimate reconstructions with an innovative analysis of skeletal remains from one of the last abandoned villages to provide a new interpretation of the archaeological record of this period. Robbins Schug’s biocultural synthesis provides us with a new way of looking at the adaptive, social, and cultural transformations that took place in this region during the first and second millennia B.C. Her work clearly and compellingly usurps the climate change paradigm, demonstrating the complexity of human-environmental transformations. This original and significant contribution to bioarchaeological research and methodology enriches our understanding of both global climate change and South Asian prehistory.
Download or read book Geoarchaeology written by Carlos Cordova and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geoarchaeology is traditionally concerned with reconstructing the environmental aspects of past societies using the methods of the earth sciences. The field has been steadily enriched by scholars from a diversity of disciplines and much has happened as the importance of global perspectives on environmental change has emerged. Carlos Cordova, provides a fully up-to-date account of geoarchaeology that reflects the important changes that have occurred in the past four decades. Innovative features include: the development of the human-ecological approach and the impact of technology on this approach; how the diversity of disciplines contributes to archaeological questions; frontiers of archaeology in the deep past, particularly the Anthropocene; the geoarchaeology of the contemporary past; the emerging field of ethno-geoarchaeology; the role of geoarchaeology in global environmental crises and climate change.
Download or read book Public Archaeology and Climate Change written by Tom Dawson and published by Oxbow Books Limited. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifies and presents a wide ranging discussion on the major threats posed by climate change to world heritage and archaeology and demonstrates with case studies the proactive role that archaeologists and heritage professionals can take to engage the public in rasing the awareness of envrionemtal issues and in assisting with the protection, presw
Download or read book Surviving Sudden Environmental Change written by David A Abbott and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeologists have long encountered evidence of natural disasters through excavation and stratigraphy. In Surviving Sudden Environmental Change, case studies examine how eight different past human communities-ranging from Arctic to equatorial regions, from tropical rainforests to desert interiors, and from deep prehistory to living memory-faced and coped with such dangers. Many disasters originate from a force of nature, such as an earthquake, cyclone, tsunami, volcanic eruption, drought, or flood. But that is only half of the story; decisions of people and their particular cultural lifeways are the rest. Sociocultural factors are essential in understanding risk, impact, resilience, reactions, and recoveries from massive sudden environmental changes. By using deep-time perspectives provided by interdisciplinary approaches, this book provides a rich temporal background to the human experience of environmental hazards and disasters. In addition, each chapter is followed by an abstract summarizing the important implications for today's management practices and providing recommendations for policy makers. Publication supported in part by the National Science Foundation.
Download or read book Climate Change and Human Impact on the Landscape written by F. M. Chambers and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I am pleased to present this volume of invited reviews and research case studies, produced to mark the retirement of Professor A. G. Smith - one of the leading researchers in Holocene palaeoecology. A. G. Smith took his first degree at the University of Sheffield, graduating in 1951 with a first-class honours degree in Botany. His doctorate was awarded in 1956 for a study in late-Quaternary vege tational history, based in the Sub-Department of Quaternary Research at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of the late Sir Harry Godwin, FRS. He then researched and taught at Queen's University, Belfast, from 1954, leading the Nuffield Quaternary Research Unit there, becoming Co-Director of the Palaeoecology Laboratory from 1964. He was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Botany (later, Plant Science) at University College, Cardiff, in 1973, and retired from the School of Pure and Applied Biology at the renamed University of Wales College, Cardiff, in August 1991. Although his principal interests have been concerned with the post-glacial environmental history of the British Isles, Professor Smith has significantly in fluenced many researchers elsewhere in their interpretation of biological and other evidence for human modification of the natural environment.
Download or read book Environmental Archaeology written by Elizabeth Reitz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most significant developments in archaeology in recent years is the emergence of its environmental branch: the study of humans’ interactions with their natural surroundings over long periods and of organic remains instead of the artifacts and household items generally associated with sites. With the current attention paid to human responsibility for environmental change, this innovative field is recognized by scientists, conservation and heritage managers and policymakers worldwide. In this context comes Environmental Archaeology by Elizabeth Reitz and Myra Shackley, updating the seminal 1981 text Environmental Archaeology by Myra Shackley. Rigorously detailed yet concise and accessible, this volume surveys the complex and technical field of environmental archaeology for researchers interested in the causes, consequences and potential future impact of environmental change and archaeology. Its coverage acknowledges the multiple disciplines involved in the field, expanding the possibilities for using environmental data from archaeological sites in enriching related disciplines and improving communication among them. Introductory chapters explain the processes involved in the formation of sites, introduce research designs and field methods and walk the reader through biological classifications before focusing on the various levels of biotic and abiotic materials found at sites, including: Sediments and soils. Viruses, bacteria, archaea, protists and fungi. Bryophytes and vascular plants. Wood, charcoal, stems, leaves and roots. Spores, pollen and other microbotanical remains. Arthropods, molluscs, echinoderms and vertebrates. Stable isotopes, elements and biomolecules. The updated Environmental Archaeology is a major addition to the resource library of archaeologists, environmentalists, historians, researchers, policymakers—anyone involved in studying, managing or preserving historical sites. The updated Environmental Archaeology is a major addition to the resource library of archaeologists, environmentalists, historians, researchers, policymakers—anyone involved in studying, managing, or preserving historical sites.
Download or read book Geoarchaeology written by Carlos E. Cordova and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Geoarchaeology is traditionally concerned with reconstructing the environmental aspects of past societies using the methods of the earth sciences. The field has been steadily enriched by scholars from a diversity of disciplines and much has happened as the importance of global perspectives on environmental change has emerged. Carlos Cordova, provides a fully up-to-date account of geoarchaeology that reflects the important changes that have occurred in the past four decades. Innovative features include: the development of the human-ecological approach and the impact of technology on this approach; how the diversity of disciplines contributes to archaeological questions; frontiers of archaeology in the deep past, particularly the Anthropocene; the geoarchaeology of the contemporary past; the emerging field of ethno-geoarchaeology; the role of geoarchaeology in global environmental crises and climate change.
Download or read book Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond written by Jean T. Larmon and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond investigates climate change and sustainability through time, exploring how political control of water sources, maintenance of sustainable systems, ideological relationships with water, and fluctuations in water availability have affected and been affected by social change. Contributors focus on and build upon earlier investigations of the global diversity of water management systems and the successes and failures of their employment, while applying a multitude of perspectives on sustainability. The volume focuses primarily on the Precolumbian Maya but offers several analogous case studies outside the ancient Maya world that illustrate the pervasiveness of water’s role in sustainability, including an ethnographic study of the sustainability of small-scale, farmer-managed irrigation systems in contemporary New Mexico and the environmental consequences of Angkor’s growth into the world’s most extensive preindustrial settlement. The archaeological record offers rich data on past politics of climate change, while epigraphic and ethnographic data show how integrated the ideological, political, and environmental worlds of the Maya were. While Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond stresses how lessons from the past offer invaluable insight into current approaches of adaptation, it also advances our understanding of those adaptations by making the inevitable discrepancies between past and present climate change less daunting and emphasizing the sustainable negotiations between humans and their surroundings that have been mediated by the changing climate for millennia. It will appeal to students and scholars interested in climate change, sustainability, and water management in the archaeological record. Contributors: Mary Jane Acuña, Wendy Ashmore, Timothy Beach, Jeffrey Brewer, Christopher Carr, Adrian S. Z. Chase, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Carlos R. Chiriboga, Jennifer Chmilar, Nicholas Dunning, Maurits W. Ertsen, Roland Fletcher, David Friedel, Robert Griffin, Joel D. Gunn, Armando Anaya Hernández, Christian Isendahl, David Lentz, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Dan Penny, Kathryn Reese-Taylor, Michelle Rich, Cynthia Robin, Sylvia Rodríguez, William Saturno, Vernon Scarborough, Payson Sheets, Liwy Grazioso Sierra, Michael Smyth, Sander van der Leeuw, Andrew Wyatt
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Wetland Archaeology written by Francesco Menotti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 970 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook sets out the key issues and debates in the theory and practice of wetland archaeology which has played a crucial role in studies of our past. Due to the high quantity of preserved organic materials found in humid environments, the study of wetlands has allowed archaeologists to reconstruct people's everyday lives in great detail.
