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 2009-09-15 with total page 344 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 regionsÑNorth America, Mesoamerica, Europe, the Near East, and AfricaÑfrom time periods spanning the Holocene, and from environments ranging from tropical forest to desert. Ê 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. Ê These contributions show that by examining long-term trajectories of socio-natural relationships we can better define concepts such as sustainability, land degradation, and conservationÑand 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. Ê

Download or read book Surviving Sudden Environmental Change written by Jago Cooper and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 355 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 The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Climate and Environmental Change written by Gwen Robbins Schug and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook examines human responses to climatic and environmental changes in the past,and their impacts on disease patterns, nutritional status, migration, and interpersonal violence. Bioarchaeology—the study of archaeological human skeletons—provides direct evidence of the human experience of past climate and environmental changes and serves as an important complement to paleoclimate, historical, and archaeological approaches to changes we may expect with global warming. Comprising 27 chapters from experts across a broad range of time periods and geographical regions, this book addresses hypotheses about how climate and environmental changes impact human health and well-being, factors that promote resilience, and circumstances that make migration or interpersonal violence a more likely outcome. The volume highlights the potential relevance of bioarchaeological analysis to contemporary challenges by organizing the chapters into a framework outlined by the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Planning for a warmer world requires knowledge about humans as biological organisms with a deep connection to Earth's ecosystems balanced by an appreciation of how historical and socio-cultural circumstances, socioeconomic inequality, degrees of urbanization, community mobility, and social institutions play a role in shaping long-term outcomes for human communities. Containing a wealth of nuanced perspectives about human-environmental relations, book is key reading for students of environmental archaeology, bioarchaeology, and the history of disease. By providing a longer view of contemporary challenges, it may also interest readers in public health, public policy, and planning.

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 Historical Archaeology and Environment written by Marcos André Torres de Souza and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-02 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 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 283 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 Climate Change and Human Responses written by Gregory Monks and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contributes to the current discussion on climate change by presenting selected studies on the ways in which past human groups responded to climatic and environmental change. In particular, the chapters show how these responses are seen in the animal remains that people left behind in their occupation sites. Many of these bones represent food remains, so the environments in which these animals lived can be identified and human use of those environments can be understood. In the case of climatic change resulting in environmental change, these animal remains can indicate that a change has occurred, in climate, environment and human adaptation, and can also indicate the specific details of those changes.

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 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 The Anthropology of Climate Change written by Hans Baer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Climate and Ancient Societies written by Susanne Kerner and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate and human responses to it have a strongly interconnected relationship. Thus when climate change occurs, the result of either natural or human causes, societies should react and adapt to these. But do they? If so, what is the nature of that change, and are the responses positive or negative for the long-term survival of social groups? In Climate and Societies, scholars from diverse disciplines includ-ing archaeology, geology and climate sciences explore scientific and material evidence for climate changes in the past, their causes, their effects on ancient societies and how those societies responded. Organized around four key themes each dealing with ways to understand past climates, human impact, and sustainability – holocene climate reconstruction; responses of complex societies to climatic variation; Archaeological evidence for pollution and its ecological implica-tions; and stable isotope analysis in the Middle East – the chapters demonstrate the value of a longue durée perspective on a topic of crucial importance to the future of our planet. Climate and Ancient Societies is dedicated to the memory of the Danish scholar, zooarchaeologist, Dr. Stine Rossel, University of Copenhagen who died following a freak accident, while hiking with her husband in the White Mountains of New Hampshire (USA), shortly after having submitted her dissertation to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences for the PhD in Anthropology. The dissertation The Development of Productive Subsistence Economies in the Nile Valley: Zooarchaeological Analysis at El-Mahâsna and South Abydos, Upper Egypt is available online (ProQuest document ID: 1464110981; ISBN 9780549278788). Stine Rossel carried out her main fieldwork in Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Pakistan and published her findings in numerous publications, which laid the groundwork for what would no doubt have been a promising career. Contributors: Peter M.M.G. Akkermans, Benjamin S. Arbuckle, Pernille Bangsgaard, Miroslav Bárta, Peter F. Biehl, Tom Boiy, Joachim Bretschneider, Valentina Caracuta, Elise Van Campo, Claudio Casati, Louis Chaix, Rachael J. Dann, Maurits Ertsen, Girolamo Fiorentino, Karin Margarita Frei, Matthieu Honegger, Greta Jans, Akemi Kaneda, David Kaniewski, Eva Kapteijn, Susanne Kerner, Karel Van Lerberghe, Cheryl Makarewicz, Richard H. Meadow, Christopher Meiklejohn, Deborah C. Merrett, Olivier P. Nieuwenhuyse, Johannes van der Plicht, Simone Riehl, Neil Roberts, Anna Russell, Lasse Sørensen, Jason Ur, Joshua Wright. Susanne Kerner is associate professor at the Institute for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Rachael J. Dann is associate professor of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology at the Institute for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Pernille Bangsgaard is assistant professor at the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen.

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 Environmental Humanities written by Sjoerd Kluiving and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-28 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been an increasing archaeological interest in human-animal-nature relations, where archaeology has shifted from a focus on deciphering meaning, or understanding symbols and the social construction of the landscape to an acknowledgment of how things, places, and the environment contribute with their own agencies to the shaping of relations.This means that the environment cannot be regarded as a blank space that landscape meaning is projected onto. Parallel to this, the field of environmental humanities poses the question of how to work with the intermeshing of humans and their surroundings.To allow the environment back in as an active agent of change, means that landscape archaeology can deal better with issues such as global warming, an escalating loss of biodiversity, as well as increasingly toxic environment. However, this does not leave human agency out of the equation. It is humans who reinforce the environmental challenges of today.The scholarly field of the humanities deal with questions like how is meaning attributed, what cultural factors drive human action, what role is played by ethics, how is landscape experienced emotionally, as well as how concepts derived from art, literature, and history function in such processes of meaning attribution and other cultural processes. This humanities approach is of utmost importance when dealing with climate and environmental challenges ahead and we need a new landscape archaeology that meets these challenges, but also that meets well across disciplinary boundaries. Here inspiration can be found in discussions with scholars in the emerging field of Environmental Humanities.

Download or read book Climate Change Archaeology written by Robert Van de Noort and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering study provides the theoretical basis for archaeological data to be included in climate change debate. Applying an approach which uses archaeological research as a repository of ideas and concepts, it illustrates the pathways implemented in times of climate change in the past and how these can help prepare modern communities.

Download or read book Environmental Archaeology written by Evangelia Pişkin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-11 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to thoroughly discuss new directions of thinking in the arena of environmental archaeology and test them by presenting new practical applications. Recent theoretical and epistemological advancement in the field of archaeology calls for a re-definition of the subdiscipline of environmental archaeology and its position within the practise of archaeology. New technological and methodological discoveries in hard sciences and computer applications opened fresh ways for interdisciplinary collaborations thus introducing new branches and specialisations that need now to be accommodated and integrated within the previous status-quo. This edited volume will take the challenge and engage with contemporary international discussions about the role of the discipline within the general framework of archaeology. By drawing upon these debates, the contributors to this volume will rethink what environmental archaeology is and what kind of input the investigation of this kind of materiality has to the reconstruction of human history and sociality.

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 Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology written by Elizabeth Reitz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights studies addressing significant anthropological issues in the Americas from the perspective of environmental archaeology. The book uses case studies to resolve questions related to human behavior in the past rather than to demonstrate the application of methods. Each chapter is an original or revised work by an internationally-recognized scientist. This second edition is based on the 1996 book of the same title. The editors have invited back a number of contributors from the first edition to revise and update their chapter. New studies are included in order to cover recent developments in the field or additional pertinent topics.