Surviving Sudden Environmental Change

Surviving Sudden Environmental Change
Author: Jago Cooper
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1457117266

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.

Unveiling Pachacamac

Unveiling Pachacamac
Author: Giancarlo Marcone
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2022-08-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813070112

New data from the past 25 years of research at an important pre-Hispanic site The sacred Andean site of Pachacamac, inhabited for over a thousand years before the Spanish Conquest, has an enduring presence in Peruvian history and plays a pivotal role in the formation of current views about religion and thought in the pre-Hispanic period. Unveiling Pachacamac is the first volume to synthesize the past quarter century’s abundance of new data and hypotheses on this important sanctuary. Gathering contributions from an international array of leading researchers working at the site, this volume examines deep theoretical questions about social change, interregional interactions, the nature of religion, and issues of cultural continuity. It is also the first book to look at the site in relation with its territory and hinterland. As Pachacamac is widely considered an archetypal Andean shrine, used by researchers as a vital reference in comparative analyses of sanctuaries and religions in precapitalist societies, this volume will have a long-lasting impact on the field of archaeology. Contributors: Andrea Gonzales Lombardi| Barbara Winsborough | Denise Pozzi-Escot | Enrique López – Hurtado | Giancarlo Marcone | Izumi Shimada | Katiusha Bernuy | Krzysztof Makowski | Lawrence S. Owens | Lucy Salazar | Peter Eeckhout | Rafael A. Segura | Richard Burger

Time and Environmental Law

Time and Environmental Law
Author: Benjamin J. Richardson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2017-08-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 110812741X

Disciplined by industrial clock time, modern life distances people from nature's biorhythms such as its ecological, evolutionary, and climatic processes. The law is complicit in numerous ways. It compresses time through 'fast-track' legislation and accelerated resource exploitation. It suffers from temporal inertia, such as 'grandfathering' existing activities that limits the law's responsiveness to changing circumstances. Insouciance about past ecological damage, and neglect of its restoration, are equally serious temporal flaws: we cannot live sustainably while Earth remains degraded and unrepaired. Applying international and interdisciplinary perspectives on these issues, Time and Environmental Law explores how to align law with the ecological 'timescape' and enable humankind to 'tell nature's time'. Lending insight into environmental behaviour and impacts, this book pioneers a new understanding of environmental law for all societies, and makes recommendations for its reform. Minding nature, not the clock, requires regenerating Earth, adapting to its changes, and living more slowly.

Climate and Cultural Change in Prehistoric Europe and the Near East

Climate and Cultural Change in Prehistoric Europe and the Near East
Author: Peter F. Biehl
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-11-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438461844

The subject of climate change could hardly be more timely. In Climate and Cultural Change in Prehistoric Europe and the Near East, an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine climate change through the lens of new archaeological and paleo-environmental data over the course of more than 10,000 years from the Near East to Europe. Key climatic and other events are contextualized with cultural changes and transitions for which the authors discuss when, how, and if, changes in climate and environment caused people to adapt, move or perish. More than this publication of crucial archaeological and paleo-environmental data, however, the volume seeks to understand the social, political and economic significance of climate change as it was manifested in various ways around the Old World. Contrary to perceptions of threatening global warming in our popular media, and in contrast to grim images of collapse presented in some archaeological discussions of past climate change, this book rejects outright societal collapse as a likely outcome. Yet this does not keep the authors from considering climate change as a potential factor in explaining culture change by adopting a critical stance with regard to the long-standing practice of equating synchronicity with causality, and explicitly considering alternative explanations.

The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth
Author: David Wallace-Wells
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2019-02-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 052557672X

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

Agricultural Sustainability and Environmental Change at Ancient Gordion

Agricultural Sustainability and Environmental Change at Ancient Gordion
Author: John M. Marston
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2017-08-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1934536911

This book publishes the results of 220 botanical samples from the 1993-2002 Gordion excavations directed by Mary Voigt. Together with Naomi Miller's 2010 volume (Gordion Special Studies 5), this book completes the publication of botanical samples from Voigt's excavations. The book aims to reconstruct agricultural decision making using archaeological and paleoenvironmental data from Gordion to describe environmental and agricultural changes at the site. John M. Marston argues that different political and economic systems implemented over time at Gordion resulted in patterns of agricultural decision making that were well adapted to the social setting of farmers in each period, but that these practices had divergent environmental impacts, with some regimes sponsoring sustainable agricultural practices and others leading to significant environmental change. The implications of this book are twofold: Gordion will now be one of the best published agricultural datasets from the entire Near East and, thus, serve as a valuable comparable dataset for regional synthesis of agricultural and environmental change, and the methods the author developed to reconstruct agricultural change at Gordion serves as tools to engage questions about the relationship between social and environmental change at sites worldwide. Other books address similar themes but none in the Near East address these themes in diachronic perspective such as we have at Gordion. University Museum Monograph, 145

Eldercare, Health, and Ecosyndemics in a Perilous World

Eldercare, Health, and Ecosyndemics in a Perilous World
Author: Janelle Christensen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2018-10-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0759123942

Humans are at a unique crossroads: never before have we had such a clear understanding of how our actions affect a changing climate, or how our settlement patterns along coastal environments put us at risk of rising sea levels. However, the science behind climate change (and solutions for it) are engulfed in political controversy. Dr. Christensen uses anthropological methods to illuminate the lived experience of families caring for elder relatives during climate related events: a unique conundrum facing increasing numbers of people living in coastal areas. As populations in industrialized countries grow older, they become more vulnerable to climate extremes. People over 65 are more likely to die in climate related events, such as heatwaves, hurricanes, and blizzards. Dr. Christensen presents the scientific evidence for climate change, the archaeological record on how humans responded to climatic shifts in the past, and explains how the current challenges are different. Using the theoretical framework of Singer’s Syndemics, she explores how aging bodies are more vulnerable to increased environmental toxins, which is further exacerbated by climate fluctuations. A central question is: how do we value our environment, our elders, and make decisions about well-being throughout the life course?

Cycladic Archaeology and Research: New Approaches and Discoveries

Cycladic Archaeology and Research: New Approaches and Discoveries
Author: Erica Angliker
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2018-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1784918105

Recent excavations and new theoretical approaches are changing our view of the Cyclades. This volume aims to share these recent developments with a broader, international audience. Essays have been carefully selected as representing some of the most important recent work and include significant previously-unpublished material.

Collapse or Survival

Collapse or Survival
Author: Elisa Perego
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2019-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789251036

In the present-day world order, political disintegration, the faltering of economic systems, the controversial yet dramatic consequences of global warming and pollution, and the spread of poverty and social disruption in Western countries have rendered ‘collapse’ one of the hottest topics in the humanities and social sciences. In the frenetic run for identifying the global causes and large-scale consequences of collapse, however, instances of crisis taking place at the micro-scale are not always explored by scholars addressing these issues in present and past societies, while the ‘voices’ of the marginal/non-élite subjects that might be the main victims of collapse are often silenced in ancient history and archaeology. Within this framework Collapse or Survival explores localized phenomena of crisis, unrest, and survival in the ancient Mediterranean with a focus on the first millennium BC. In a time span characterized by unprecedented high levels of dynamism, mobility, and social change throughout that region, the area selected for analysis represents a unique convergence point where states rise and fall, long-distance trade networks develop and disintegrate, and patterns of human mobility catalyze cultural change at different rates. The central Mediterranean also comprises a wealth of recently excavated and highly contextualized material evidence, casting new light on the agency of individuals and groups who endeavored to cope with crisis situations in different geographical and temporal settings. Contributors provide novel definitions of ‘collapse’ and reconsider notions of crisis and social change by taking a broader perspective that is not necessarily centred on élites. Individual chapters analyze how both high-status and non-élite social agents responded to socio-political rupture, unrest, depopulation, economic crisis, the disintegration of kinship systems, interruption in long-term trade networks, and destruction in war.