Download or read book The Statues that Walked written by Terry Hunt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works? No such astonishing numbers of massive statues are found anywhere else in the Pacific. How could the islanders possibly have moved so many multi-ton monoliths from the quarry inland, where they were carved, to their posts along the coastline? And most intriguing and vexing of all, if the island once boasted a culture developed and sophisticated enough to have produced such marvelous edifices, what happened to that culture? Why was the island the Europeans encountered a sparsely populated wasteland? The prevailing accounts of the island’s history tell a story of self-inflicted devastation: a glaring case of eco-suicide. The island was dominated by a powerful chiefdom that promulgated a cult of statue making, exercising a ruthless hold on the island’s people and rapaciously destroying the environment, cutting down a lush palm forest that once blanketed the island in order to construct contraptions for moving more and more statues, which grew larger and larger. As the population swelled in order to sustain the statue cult, growing well beyond the island’s agricultural capacity, a vicious cycle of warfare broke out between opposing groups, and the culture ultimately suffered a dramatic collapse. When Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo began carrying out archaeological studies on the island in 2001, they fully expected to find evidence supporting these accounts. Instead, revelation after revelation uncovered a very different truth. In this lively and fascinating account of Hunt and Lipo’s definitive solution to the mystery of what really happened on the island, they introduce the striking series of archaeological discoveries they made, and the path-breaking findings of others, which led them to compelling new answers to the most perplexing questions about the history of the island. Far from irresponsible environmental destroyers, they show, the Easter Islanders were remarkably inventive environmental stewards, devising ingenious methods to enhance the island’s agricultural capacity. They did not devastate the palm forest, and the culture did not descend into brutal violence. Perhaps most surprising of all, the making and moving of their enormous statutes did not require a bloated population or tax their precious resources; their statue building was actually integral to their ability to achieve a delicate balance of sustainability. The Easter Islanders, it turns out, offer us an impressive record of masterful environmental management rich with lessons for confronting the daunting environmental challenges of our own time. Shattering the conventional wisdom, Hunt and Lipo’s ironclad case for a radically different understanding of the story of this most mysterious place is scientific discovery at its very best.

Download or read book Island of Fogs written by Matthew R Des Lauriers and published by University of Utah Press. This book was released on 2010-12-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Located off the west coast of the Mexican state of Baja California, Isla Cedros—Island of Fogs—is site to some of the most extensive and remarkable archeological discoveries on the continent. Two sites dated to before 12,000 cal BP have been excavated, as well as portions of two large village sites dated to the last one thousand years. Among the artifacts discovered are the earliest fishhooks found on the continent. Drawing on ten years of his own historical, ethnographic, and archaeological research, Matthew Des Lauriers uses Isla Cedros to form hypotheses regarding the ecological, economic, and social nature of island societies. Des Lauriers uses a comparative framework in order to examine both the development and evolution of social structures among Pacific coast maritime hunter-gatherers as well as to track patterns of change. Because it examines the issue of whether human populations can intensively harvest natural resources without causing ecological collapse, Island of Fogs provides a relevant historical counterpart to modern discussions of ecological change and alternative models for sustainable development. Winner of the Society for American Archaeology Book Award.

Download or read book ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE MEDIA written by Timothy Clack and published by Left Coast Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The public's fascination with archaeology has meant that archaeologists have had to deal with media more regularly than other scholarly disciplines. In this volume, a group of archaeologists address a wide range of questions in this intersection of fields.

Download or read book The Environmental Justice Reader written by Joni Adamson and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the First National People of Color Congress on Environmental Leadership to WTO street protests of the new millennium, environmental justice activists have challenged the mainstream movement by linking social inequalities to the uneven distribution of environmental dangers. Grassroots movements in poor communities and communities of color strive to protect neighborhoods and worksites from environmental degradation and struggle to gain equal access to the natural resources that sustain their cultures. This book examines environmental justice in its social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions in both local and global contexts, with special attention paid to intersections of race, gender, and class inequality. The first book to link political studies, literary analysis, and teaching strategies, it offers a multivocal approach that combines perspectives from organizations such as the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice and the International Indigenous Treaty Council with the insights of such notable scholars as Devon Peña, Giovanna Di Chiro, and Valerie Kuletz, and also includes a range of newer voices in the field. This collection approaches environmental justice concerns from diverse geographical, ethnic, and disciplinary perspectives, always viewing environmental issues as integral to problems of social inequality and oppression. It offers new case studies of native Alaskans' protests over radiation poisoning; Hispanos' struggles to protect their land and water rights; Pacific Islanders' resistance to nuclear weapons testing and nuclear waste storage; and the efforts of women employees of maquiladoras to obtain safer living and working environments along the U.S.-Mexican border. The selections also include cultural analyses of environmental justice arts, such as community art and greening projects in inner-city Baltimore, and literary analyses of writers such as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Linda Hogan, Barbara Neely, Nez Perce orators, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Karen Yamashita—artists who address issues such as toxicity and cancer, lead poisoning of urban African American communities, and Native American struggles to remove dams and save salmon. The book closes with a section of essays that offer models to teachers hoping to incorporate these issues and texts into their classrooms. By combining this array of perspectives, this book makes the field of environmental justice more accessible to scholars, students, and concerned readers.

Download or read book Shovel Ready written by Bernard K. Means and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2013-01-25 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in March 1933 with the excavation of the Marksville mound site in Louisiana, and throughout the next decade, ordinary citizens labored in New Deal jobs programs and participated in archaeological excavations across the United States. Under the auspices of work relief programs, people were provided the opportunity to explore and document American Indian villages and mounds, important historic places, and homes associated with events and people critical to the foundation of the country.

Download or read book Reading the Roots written by Michael P. Branch and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading the Roots is an unprecedented anthology of outstanding early writings about American nature--a rich, influential, yet critically underappreciated body of work. Rather than begin with Henry David Thoreau, who is often identified as the progenitor of American nature writing, editor Michael P. Branch instead surveys the long tradition that prefigures and anticipates Thoreau and his literary descendants. The selections in Reading the Roots describe a diversity of landscapes, wildlife, and natural phenomena, and their authors represent many different nationalities, cultural affiliations, religious views, and ideological perspectives. The writings gathered here also range widely in terms of subject, rhetorical form, and disciplinary approach--from promotional tracts and European narratives of contact with Native Americans to examples of scientific theology and romantic nature writing. The volume also includes a critical introduction discussing the cultural, scientific, and literary value of early American nature writing; headnotes that contextualize all authors and selections; and a substantial bibliography of primary and secondary sources in the field. Reading the Roots at last makes early American landscapes--and a range of literary responses to them--accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.

Download or read book Commingled and Disarticulated Human Remains written by Anna J. Osterholtz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ​Commingled and Disarticulated Human Remains:Working Toward Improved Theory, Method, and Data brings together research that provides innovative methodologies for the analysis of commingled human remains. It has temporal and spatial breadth, with case studies coming from pre-state to historic periods, as well as from both the New and Old World. Highlights of this volume include: standardizes methods and presents best practices in the field using a case study approach demonstrates how data gathered from commingled human remains can be incorporated into the overall interpretation of a site explores best way to formulate population size, using commingled remains Field archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, academic anthropologists, forensic anthropologists, zoo archaeologists, and students of anthropology and archaeology will find this to be an invaluable resource.

Download or read book Robert Frost written by Lea Newman and published by . This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mending Walls." "The Road Not Taken." "Birches." Many of Robert Frost's poems have become part of modern American culture. Frost used the pleasures and trials of rural New England life to create poetry of universal meaning and appeal. Lea Newman's Robert Frost: The People, Places, and Stories Behind His New England Poetry is a fascinating exploration of the world of Robert Frost. Concise essays accompanying each of thirty-six of Frost's early New England poems invite readers to discover the life and work of America's favorite poet.

Download or read book Gardening in the Tropics written by Olive Senior and published by Insomniac Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gardening in the Tropics contains a rich Caribbean world in poems offered to readers everywhere. Olive Senior's rich vein of humour can turn wry and then sharp in satire of colour-consciousness, class-consciousness and racism. But her predominant tone is the verbal equivalent of a pair of wide-open arms.

Download or read book Directions to the Beach of the Dead written by Richard Blanco and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his second book of narrative, lyric poetry, Richard Blanco explores the familiar, unsettling journey for home and connections, those anxious musings about other lives: ÒShould I live here? Could I live here?Ó Whether the exotic (ÒIÕm struck with Maltese fever ÉI dream of buying a little Maltese farmÉ) or merely different (ÒToday, home is a cottage with morning in the yawn of an open windowÉÓ), he examines the restlessness that threatens from merely staying put, the fear of too many places and too little time. The words are redolent with his Cuban heritage: Marina making mole sauce; T’a Ida bitter over the revolution, missing the sisters who fled to Miami; his father, especially, Òhis hair once as black as the black of his oxfordsÉÓ Yet this is a volume for all who have longed for enveloping arms and words, and for that sanctuary called home. ÒSo much of my life spent like this-suspended, moving toward unknown places and names or returning to those I know, corresponding with the paradox of crossing, being nowhere yet here.Ó Blanco embraces juxtaposition. There is the Cuban Blanco, the American Richard, the engineer by day, the poet by heart, the rhythms of Spanish, the percussion of English, the first-world professional, the immigrant, the gay man, the straight world. There is the ennui behind the question: why cannot I not just live where I live? Too, there is the precious, fleeting relief when he can write "ÉI am, for a moment, not afraid of being no more than what I hear and see, no more than this:..." It is what we all hope for, too.

Download or read book A Cormac Mccarthy Companion written by Edwin T. Arnold and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to examine McCarthya s three masterpiece novels as a cohesive whole"

Download or read book Fresh Tracks written by Pamela Banting and published by Global Professional Publishi. This book was released on 1998 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is an exceptionally forceful collection, substantial, evocative and enduring, much like the region of Canada the writers are addressing." -Saskatoon Star PhoenixContributors include Rudy Wiebe, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Karen Connelly, Sharon Butala, and others.

Download or read book A Coast of Trees written by A. R. Ammons and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002-12-17 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of shorter poems won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. Of this volume, the noted critic Harold Bloom has written, "A Coast of Trees represents A. R. Ammons at his strongest and most eloquent in the lyric mode. The book is an achievement fully comparable to his Uplands and Briefings. Among the poems likely to assume a permanent place in the Ammonsian (and American) canon are the majestic title lyric and 'Swells,' 'Easter Morning,' 'Keepsake,' 'Givings,' and 'Persistences.' Again Ammons has confirmed his vital continuities with the central Whitmanian tradition of our poetry, and his crucial place in that panoply."

Download or read book Writing Revolution written by Peter J. Bellis and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, formalist and deconstructive approaches to literary studies have been under attack, charged by critics with isolating texts as distinctive aesthetic or linguistic objects, separate from their social and historical contexts. Historicist and cultural approaches have often responded by simply reversing the picture, reducing texts to no more than superstructural effects of historical or ideological forces. In Writing Revolution, Peter J. Bellis explores the ways in which literature can engage with—rather than escape from or obscure—social and political issues. Bellis argues that a number of nineteenth-century American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, saw their texts as spaces where alternative social and cultural possibilities could be suggested and explored. All writing in the same historical moment, Bellis's subjects were responding to the same cluster of issues: the need to redefine American identity after the Revolution, the problem of race slavery, and the growing industrialization of American society. Hawthorne, Bellis contends, sees the romance as "neutral territory" where the Imaginary and the Actual—the aesthetic and the historical—can interpenetrate and address crucial issues of class, race, and technological modernity. Whitman conceives of Leaves of Grass as a transformative democratic space where all forms of meditation, both political and literary, are swept away. Thoreau oscillates between these two approaches. Walden, like the romance, aims to fashion a mediating space between nature and society. His abolitionist essays, however, shift sharply away from both linguistic representation and the political, toward an apocalyptic cleansing violence. In addition to covering selected works by Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau, Bellis also examines powerful works of social and political critique by Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller. With its suggestions for new ways of reading antebellum American writing, Writing Revolution breaks through the thickets of contemporary literary discourse and will spark debate in the literary community.

Download or read book The Women s West written by Susan Armitage and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses selections from diaries, public records, letters, interviews, and fiction to describe the experiences of women in the West, including Indians, servants, waitresses, prostitutes, and farmers

Download or read book Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy written by Edwin T. Arnold and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cormac McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, won the William Faulkner Award. His other books - Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian - have drawn a cult readership and the praise of such writers as Annie Dillard and Shelby Foote. "There are so many people out there who seem to have a hunger to know more about McCarthy's work," says McCarthy scholar Vereen Bell. Helping to satisfy such a need, this collection of essays, one of the few critical studies of Cormac McCarthy, introduces his work and lays the groundwork for study of an important but underrecognized American novelist, winner in 1992 of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses. The essays explore McCarthy's historical and philosophical sources, grapple with the difficult task of identifying the moral center in his works, and identify continuities in his fiction. Included too is a bibliography of works by and about him. As they reflect critical perspectives on the works of this eminent writer, these essays afford a pleasing introduction to all his novels and his screenplay, "The Gardener's Son."

Download or read book The Midwestern Pastoral written by William David Barillas and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Midwestern Studies Book Award, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barrillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists---Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison---in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres, current U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, author of Grass Roots, and others. The Midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in poetry, fiction, and essays that expresses an informed love of nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest.Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, this book will appeal to students and serious readers, as well as scholars in the growing field of literature and the environment. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: William Barillas is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He is the author of many essays on American literature and the editor of the forthcoming Interior Borderlands: Writings on Latino/a Literature of Chicago and the Midwest.